< 210 Avenue A, New York, NY 10009 >

For my girlfriend’s birthday last month, we arrived to our reservation a bit early, so we strolled into Motel No Tell, on the Corner of Ave A and 13th, to kill time. My first drink, The Spanish Steps, tasted like a soda fountain gone flat. I checked the menu again - “Strawberry Infused Mezcal, Ulrich Bitter, Istine, Mirto, Orange bitters,” and realized I accidentally ordered a mezcal negroni of sorts. The mention of strawberry distracted me, and the other names I hadn’t recognised, so perhaps the orange bitters should have been a give away. Doesn’t every negroni kind of taste like soda syrup sans CO2? I reminded myself I like heavy alcohol drinks with a velvety mask of vermouth and/or amaro. They make an adults think luxury, rather than corn syrup, and, at best, taste the way Eyes Wide Shut feels.

On first impression, I think of the Sandy Hut in Portland Oregon. On second impression I think of The Commodore and Commodore II being mashed together. The food pics on Google maps look like everything from that near core core Tik Tok video satirizing “My Weekend As A 28-Year-Old in Chicago.” But also, doesn’t pretty much everything? I have had friends lament the corporatization of all the old pubs in London, and the whole of England. A handful of large hospitality groups bought out all the rundown old pubs and remodeled them within a singular mold. Here in America we haven’t even need for a corporate mothership to perform tractor mind control as new businesses rush, nay only exist, to service the middle of the palate. Do we, of our own collective accord, huddle wherest it be furthest from the financial edge? The foundation solid if shallow? However if the whole palate (or let’s imagine that door at the end of the Titanic much much larger) all descend upon and squat the middle point, topping each other’s shoulders, would the cultural firmament still ultimately sink from the weight of so much sameness? Maybe I’m being too dramatic. Perhaps every certain number of city blocks requires its own 70s fringe carpet harking throwback saloon. Like the bar tabacs or brasseries of Paris; as I have mention surely 3 times too many. This one is a bit too close to the L train, perhaps the highest ratio of retro-bar-to-train-station line of any in the MTA, to not arouse suspicion some city ordinance may already be on the books.

The night of our visit was the week before Christmas and all through the bar, every creature was drinking, even some more by far. Decorations lined the back bar with care, and the bartender was Irish from county Kildare. Speakers blared festive pop songs from Ariana and Wham! As a gen z girl raised her phone to Shazam. ‘How could she not know?’ I asked in indignation. ‘Nov and December it’s on any top 40 station!’ ‘She’s too young’ says my sweetheart, quite correct in her plea. The bartender looks over ‘Where off to now are yee?’ ‘To omakase just there across the street.’ ‘Ah I hear it’s a good place to eat.’ ‘Before you leave would you both like a shot?’ ‘Well now good sir we would like that a lot!’ Upon us two shots of tequila he’d bless, to me in nice suit and my girlfriend birthday dress. Our time at the Motel was pleasant no doubt. But to make our res we had to check out.

Went to Sushi W on 13th which was fun. There was another couple there for a birthday so we said hi and congrats but they seemed nonplused. The server came around half way through the courses to let us try and roll some dice in a bowl to win a drink. We didn’t win. The other birthday girl did win and got a white wine. Why are there so many Sagittarians? Is it that there are more or that they all let you know when it’s their birthday?

Motel No Tell, though funny in the kind of way New Yorkers like to laugh about living in LA, was … actually it was pretty dope. I need to go back soon and use the restroom. Surely therein lies a mini disco ball and a nostalgic breath mint/cologne/tampon/condom dispenser. Perhaps its own speaker system and separate curated playlist. Would shudder to think it was only Christmas in the bar room however.

Technological leapfrogging is a term I came to understand during my first trip to Europe, in 2017. Nearly everywhere I went (restaurant, pub, wine bar, Paris flea market kiosk) accepted card via mobile POS (Point Of Sale but Piece of Shit also works). Back then the bar I worked at still wrote out people’s tabs on flash cards and did math mentally. I was of course familiar with Venmo and Square for years, and though I had never had cause to consider it before, was confused why we didn’t have these little handheld credit card terminals back in New York; famously in the greatest city in the greatest country on mother universe’s blue marble. Now they are ubiquitous but it took an international pandemic to get there. The tech being leapfrogged is the old one that still works well enough to be useful (like signing out your tab on a receipt paper) so you haven’t had to take on the start-up cost of making the switch to a more advanced technology (the terminal thingy). Ipso facto Euros jumped from cash to table side check out and we were none the wiser. That two months trip was my first experience of the wine bar, as we know and tolerate it today; another technological restructuring predating the pandemic but popularized post-covid.

Naturally I have a theory about this. The summer of 2021 the entry to Europe reopened to those who had been vaccinated. This was made news in like May or June of that year and it is my belief everyone who was financially able pulled up a search for flights and bought the first available at a decent time and price approximately mid July. During the month-ish in between purchase and departure covid cases began to climb to a relevant level of worried but all those soon to leave for their first vacation ignored any inconvenient signs of sore throats or odd coughs and a week after touching down on the old continent were in a full swing of a new covid variant. The absconders, myself included, had to stick to the single country of their entry to avoid having to rapid test to cross borders. Meaning if you tested positive not only could you not go to Italy or wherever but you’d be stuck in whatever town you tested negative. Well that was the main worry unless say you were shuttled over from say France to Italy in hypothetically a personal vehicle with EU/Italian plates by perhaps an dating app match from say Monaco to Sanremo or Genoa. Like the movie Ronin but for clandestine pursuit of aperitif. There are worse places to be condemned to chill out in than Marseille but during August you’ll be shit out of luck for lodging as the whole town books up save for the big expensive hotel dans le Vieux-Port. This is also why we, not long ago, got the seemingly out of nowhere trend of those rubbery transparent brown French gardening clogs made from recycled hemp. A month in Southern France gives you a lot of time to kill in which you invariably visit the famously old hardware store in downtown Marseille where they did sell said clog but regrettably not in my size.

Perhaps a tedious thing for me to harp on about, but, Frog wine bar in Bed Stuy, as of publish date, cheapest wine = $16 for a smallish glass and cheapest beer $10 for a 16oz Pilsner or IPA in a can. The prices at Spring? Glass of white/red/rose/cava for $12 and a Snow beer for $7. Also that the wine bar of Paris or Marseille ou autre is probably $6 (though yes you have to also fly there) and since we are now on to places like Athens, and various isles of Greece, and yes they can be near New York prices there, but really just at tourist bars full of people professedly half Greek (and the other half French), and at the one spot on Sifnos next to the old drunk Rum bar with the stray cats above the cove, with the restaurant Obama went to... Just some preconditions so we are functioning within similar parameters. I did have some of the best seafood I’ve ever eaten at the taverna right next door but it’s not like I grew up eating sun softened squid so I’m not an expert and this is a website for reviews of bars so…

I was at the current hottest hotspot Bar Oliver. I walked in around 3pm with a bit of cash and a few emails to read through. I ordered a small beer (a demi) from the nice young men behind the bar. The three journeymen sommeliers began a conversation about wine. They discussed how the fall of the Iron Curtain fomented a return to more traditional processes by regional winemakers in the former Soviet States of the Caucasus. The USSR’s insistence of mass production and mechanization over cultural/regional identity had long troubled the vintners of say Georgia; whose history on the vine reaches back many thousands of years. They did this with the same tone and vigour I often express regarding the Knicks. Cool. It was less cool that they didn’t know me because they don’t, in my memory, frequent Mr. Fong’s for a post shift beer and a shot and thereby I was forced to pay for the full pint I was presented, despite having ordered a demi, and then furthermore explained they did not have exact change for a 20 but they had a 5 so I said “oh just keep the difference for tip” which I would have done anyway but the point being, what is going on exactly?

Spring opened on Madison St, near both Oliver and Fong’s, two weeks ago. The bar was last occupied by a brewery that I’m told wasn’t open very much and is based somewhere upstate. The renovation of the space feels open and airy, more so than say Cellar 36 and less cacophonous, and not just a little reminiscent of the old Beverly’s. In contrast to the heavier hand of say Parcelle, and brighter and more diurnal than 10 Belles or Skin Contact or Dr. Clark, more casual than Somm Time or Chloe 81, and more accessible than Le Dive and less poorly named. Despite my initial concerns of opening a bar named Spring when Spring Lounge is named Spring, in a city of over 8 million surely there may be room for two Springs. There are two Clandestinos (Klan Destino) after all. Regrettably I haven’t been to BabySips yet, but it is on my list, and RIP Gem Wine far be it from me to speak ill.

The bar to really compare Spring to is the, beloved by many, Frog wine bar. If you feel down on your luck by being unable to find a new apartment with your girlfriend in Bed Stuy, go to Frog wine to remind yourself you can’t afford the drink prices here either. On a positive note, there are significantly less children than Rhodora so it does have that going for it.

The wine bar in NYC is only about wine if you have the budget for it and require an excuse to drink. The wine bar in NYC is also about getting permission to open a bar in an area that has been inundated with too many full strength liquor licenses. It’s getting harder and harder to be approved to serve alcohol like tequila, vodka etc, all of which are around 40% or 80 proof. The wine bar caps off at 20% - like vermouth a la Bar Oliver or soju at Reception. I presume everyone to already know this all but I doubt most people have been to a community board hearing on liquor licensing. A host of regulations like proximity to a school or church or the density of such businesses in the area open up the floor to the input (mostly complalints) of neighborhood community groups who shockingly don’t often seem to be fond of new bars. I do recommend going to one of these such meetings as a date which you could allude to in your Hinge profile. Another favorite of mine is the instructional session and short tour of the recycling center in Industry City; right by that one stop the Rockaway Ferry makes in south brooklyn.

Spring is the best new bar in New York and when people find out about this they will be flooding the huge backyard to get a table. Remember how so many outside dining permits were pulled at the beginning of this summer? No issue of that here. For food they have a $12 beef curry, a pickled (and spicy) cabbage salad (almost kimchi), fries etc, and I am very much looking forward to surely fast approaching calendar of food pop-ups. The importance of home cooked beef curry, and kimchi, for dinner at 10:30 without having to walk away from a bevy of friends and conversation cannot be overstated. The biggest and most obvious piece of renovation is the large overheads awning good for shielding from both direct sun and direct rain and there’s even a big basement (shhhh). My brother had dinner, a glass of wine and beer for less than $30 pre tip. All the things I have to say that are good about it are truly plain and obvious physical attributes because it has popped up in such a way that every decision seems to just make sense because that’s what was needed to be done. Have you ever sat at the bar at Le Dive? You can’t quite get your knees under it. It was style after or inspired by Chez Jeanette in Paris where similarly you can’t get your knees quite under because people don’t really sit like that drinking at a bar in Paris anyway. But guess where they do do that big time? It feels like a combination of what makes these types of places great in Europe and great in New York City’s Chinatown: most places in Berlin or Paris or Marseille or Naples or wherever the local flavor beer/wine/spritz feels like a civil right and in Chinatown things are usually made nice and made cheap and made good because we are in the middle of New York City the best and most expensive city on Earth surely at least somewhere shouldn’t be trying to fuck you out of rent and give you the neighborly respect of saying so with their whole menu and space.

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It’s an uber popular Bushwick club staple.  It’s a roof and a lounge and a back room and the main stage.  It’s next door to the Bushwick outpost of Mission Chinese.  It’s a 5 minute walk from the Jefferson L train stop. It’s contributed to the coining of nickname “Jeff Town” for the area within a 5 minute walk of the Jefferson L train stop.  It’s a $45 dollar cab from your apartment in Chinatown.  It’s a 20 minute walk from the JMZ station at Broadway and Flushing.  It’s just past Tina’s and The Narrows and a location on Google Maps tagged as “Badass Graffiti Wall.”  It’s a really long line to get in the main entrance but much quicker through the guest list door.  It’s a Saturday night. It’s headliner Skin on Skin.  It’s Briana Cheng plus 10.  “It’s outside to the left then inside to the right.”  It’s about 3 minutes before your scrum shuffles in.  It’s not at all crowded as it’s before midnight. It’s nice there’s no line for the bar.  It’s not the only bar. It’s one of at least 4.  It’s $24 dollars for a vodka Red Bull. It’s been a while since you’ve had one. It’s $48 to buy one for yourself and another for your brother.  It’s a $62.40 total if you accidentally give a 30% tip.  It’s cool you got in for free but you are about to spend way more money than anticipated.  “It’s dead down here.”  It’s halfway down the hall, up the stairs, past the bathroom line, to the right of the bar to access the rave cave room reminiscent, of an Oakland house show, humid with human breath.  “It’s fucking packed up here I can’t move let’s mash into the corner and take drugs.”  It’s advisable you be on drugs. It’s easier for you to get drugs in the city and it’s easier to come prepared if you have any idea you’re going to end up here in the first place.  It’s 10 of you and some of you have drugs but you’ve only just met those people.  It’s a delicate conversation to begin to ask for some from a stranger as you don’t want the second thing you ever say to a person to be “can I have a bump?”  It’s too bad you didn’t make it to the afternoon rooftop party in BedStuy that everyone else was at because if you had then you’d all be buddies by now.  It’s about 400 sq ft.  It’s two or maybe three DJs.  It’s presumably bright in that booth as they are all wearing sunglasses.  It’s three men in their 30s who all look like they spin on IG Live and have a TikTok channel where they break down your favorite hip hop samples.  It’s their set at the lounge room in the back of the middle upstairs floor between the bathrooms at 11:30 on a Saturday night the weekend before college graduations.  It’s time you try to make your friend Taylor laugh with pithy jibes.  “Do they have a room here where you can pee on people?”  “It’s not that kind of place,” she says. “It's not Berlin.”  It’s giving “what do you do?” but in the way you used to ask “what’s your major?”  It’s all about dressing in the right variety of mesh to hide the accurate answer to that question, or your college sweatshirt, oddly.  It’s around 1000 capacity for the venue in total but they really shouldn’t all be in this tiny room at one time.  It’s somewhat infantilizing to perch your bum on the high seatbacks of the perimeter couches but all the standing room is taken.  It’s every 20 seconds or so you think of another one liner to yell into Taylor’s ear. It’s not likely you will remember any of them.  It’s nice to smoke cigarettes up on the roof and it’s intensely relieving that it’s from a full pack.  It’s funny that when you asked for recommendations of where to visit next for your bar review post you balked at them mostly being in Bushwick/Ridgewood yet here you are.  It’s not one of the recommendations however.  It’s probably an hour before the headliner goes on.  It’s the ten of you standing in the back of the main stage room at a T-Stop between the path to the main bar, the back room and the door to outside.  It’s hard for all of you to make your way deeper into the center of the crowd and it’s rapidly filling in.  It’s one by one you lose each member of your group.  It’s the two people who work in music to go first with their all access wristbands and inclination to stand behind the DJ.  It’s then the two single guys.  It’s next the pair on Ketamine but they don’t wander off so much as get lost.  It’s your brother third to last because it’s past his bedtime.  It’s you and the pretty girl with the drugs at the end.  It’s not so bad in that case as now you have reason to bond.  It’s her 3rd month in New York but it’s her second time living here.  It’s her friend, and roommate, the tall, also Australian, guy she’s trying to find.  It’s hard to try and find anyone as the lights change too frequently and there’s hundreds of people dancing in front of you and it’s loud which isn’t a visual disturbance but it’s making it harder to focus.  It’s not so bad to get into the raised side stage area and lord over the crowd somewhat by the front.  “It’s fine if you wanna hold on to it, I’ve had enough,” she says.  It’s Skin on Skin the headliner on.  It’s her friend that works with them and is how she knows them but it’s also notable they are both of South Sudanese descent yet grew up in Australia.  It’s Sydney that they’re from.  “It’s funny,” you say.  “It’s just yesterday I met two South Sudanese girls when I was bartending and had a lovely conversation and they also moved to Australia as young kids. It’s likely they know each other.”  “It’s not that small of a place,” she reminds you.  It’s weird you said that.  “It’s probably the coke,” you think to yourself.  It’s been over a year of ongoing war in Sudan.  It’s the largest internal displacement crisis in the world.  It’s 18,000,000 people there facing acute food insecurity.  It’s an unexpected venue for this conversation but it’s now more interesting than the music.  It’s dawning on you are getting quite chatty yet feeling more obtuse and though it’s good company you are thinking maybe you need to sit and drink a beer and not for $13.  It’s her tall friend you feel move in behind you so it’s time you can take your leave; them reunited.  “It’s been nice meeting you,” you say.  It’s a quick walk to The Narrow but it’s not the day either of your friends work.  It’s an hour before you realize James is at Lou’s and it’s a 10 minute Uber trip over there.  It’s 6am before you walk out.  It’s been a long night and it’s time to reflect as you fall half asleep over the Williamsburg Bridge.  It’s a whole week till you’re paid again next Friday.  It’s so far from home to stay out so late in Bushwick.  It’s a big club, it's a big to do, it's supposed to be fun.  It’s also a big hangover and it’s not getting any easier.  It’s freeing?  It’s community?  It’s crowded.  It’s all things to all people.  It’s exactly where I’d rather be any time I’m there.  It’s ELSEWHERE.

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Bed Stuy is home to the newest, coolest, outsidest, presumably natural, wine bar in New York City.  The name Frog is more appropriate than I initially noticed as a Google maps search reminded me Bed Stuy is home to places like Turtles, The Swan, Coyote Club, one restaurant named Bunny and another called Mama Fox, and even Lone Wolf and Birdy’s aren’t too far away. Frog sounds funny in a French accent. The term arose in England whence some of the French aristocracy, having fled the Revolution, disparagingly referred their ousters as “les grenouilles” or “the frogs.” Their new English neighbors found this funny a just decided to call all French people that. Frog is also home to the freest pool table this side of Broadway Junction though based on my experiences of Paris perhaps a foosball table would have been plus Gaulois.

I visited Frog this past Saturday to sit in the backyard and enjoy the warm 60* weather.  A block before I ran into my friend Aisa, owner of hotspots like Mr. Fong’s, Casino, and wine bar Casetta.  “What are you doing over here, you headed to Frog?”  “Yup you just leaving?”  “Sure am, you going for the backyard?”  “Yessir!”  My girlfriend noted he seemed the happiest she’d ever seen him.  “Is this because he’s far away from work?”  “Maybe geographically but something tells me his never quite too far from work.”  I live and operate in the downtown area known as Dimes Square, which I will henceforth stylize as DS2.  There are almost always people walking around, entering and exiting, sitting out front, walking in the street - it’s a busy area.  Bed Stuy on the corner of Marcus Garvey and Jefferson isn’t particularly so, so I was surprised, naively, to open the door to a raucous Saturday crowd; the bar and its interior seating totally full.  We wound our way to the backyard, which appears to seat around 75 aka the maximum municipally mandated capacity of, say, Clandestino.  73 people, of the neighborhood I may be incorrectly assuming, have taken 73 chairs and kindly left the last 2 open for myself and Vanessa, my aforementioned girlfriend.  We take our table at the center of the scrum.  A couple to my right consoles their baby which is frowning adorably having closed its tiny finger is their papa’s sunglasses case.  A man to Vanessa’s right puffs upon a cigar and wears a medium weight French chore coat befitting the tepid shade of this late afternoon spring day.  A pair of women and a tall sommelier wrestle with the fence between Frog and the property next door as they saw down a portion of the barrier to allow ease of passage from one backyard to the other.  The tall somm informed the leering eyeballs and craning necks in the vicinity they have the lease next door and are opening the second yard because it’s gonna be busy tonight.  On the strength of Frog #1’s success they have expanded to build a venue of some sort nextdoor which he elaborates they are in post-production on.  He does so in his outside voice as the din of the exterior grounds is quite a bit to compete with.  I look to the back windows of the apartments above and wonder if any are available.  Not because I love the idea of wearing earplugs to bed rather because if I could move in and make a few well timed noise complaints I bet I could get them to offer me a free tab at the bar, or heck even a rent subsidy, it absolutely would not be the first time a bar has done so to avoid a record of civil demerits from an irritable tenant above.  So great is the cost of said referrals at any bar’s next liquor/community board meeting I have heard of bars offering running tabs, to pay moving costs, renting the apartment above them just to appease the landlord.  I can’t imagine the venue next door is going to make that easier.

My first real visit here was a few days prior when I wandered in solo, reintroduced myself to the bartenders, and I got on the pool table to play a few miserably subpar games.  The table is delightfully free of charge as the side door window has been gloriously liberated to allow equal access for any and all of those who share in the interest to shoot. However, I blame Frog for my poor performance as no one should be playing pool at a wine bar; spiritually speaking.  Nothing about the two go hand in hand.  A Miller High Life and a cigarette and a pool stick somehow all in the same hand?  Sure, no problem.  But a lightly chilled red with fruity notes and mute tannins? Surely such a beverage had distorted my center of gravity or depth perception. 

There’s really nothing for me, nor you, to gain from me complaining too much about Frog because, although the wine is all $16ish and the cheapest thing on the menu is one of two varieties of forgettable beer for $10, it’s quite a nice place to visit.  So, instead I will complain about a something else seemingly separate but in my estimation ultimately to blame and the reason a bar in the middle of Bed Stuy is successfully charging $30 to become slightly tipsy.  In the fall of 2020 I went to a fall harvest party in a private wood in Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania. The party was hosted on this land by a billionaire family, who owned it, with a last name also given to a fashion company that you would likely recognise.  I left Manhattan, in the car of a friend, wearing whatever I would normally be wearing on a fall weekend eve: black slacks, black sweater over a black button up, black corduroy blazer, and black leather lace ups.  When we got to the grounds everyone else looked like they stepped out of a Double RL lookbook.  I felt like the step dad character from a 90’s family comedy where the twin girls go to their real dad’s ranch somewhere and the cityslicker steps in cow dung when exiting his limousine.  The party was great. In attendance were a cornucopia of autumnal delicacies, trash cans full of iced macrobrews, tables of natural wine but the not so good kind, even a few bands were shipped in from Bushwick, but that’s not the point.  The point came days later.  I was delegated the task of carrying the forgotten laptop of the host family’s adult male offspring back to New York City with me on Amtrak.  I remembered meeting him briefly in the woods: work boots, Carhartt pants, hunting style jacket, vintage dad hat.  I sat in front of Dimes Deli on the bench, him having texted me to meet him there, waiting to return to him the laptop in my tote bag wrapped in a sweater as it was given to me sans case.  A tall handsome young man walked up to me and asked “Alex?”  I didn’t recognize him in front of me for a moment as his appearance had changed: sleek Chelsea boots, plaid wool pants, trend vintage tee, and one of those long heavy weave wool coats that have been the reliable signifier of expensive taste for the past couple winters.  I looked up and saw the attractively coiffed 20 something before me and realized something I hadn’t previously.  I have been in New York over 9 years now but I am far from my original home in California.  I don’t have multiple wardrobes, just clothes.  I live in this area of the city out of habit and necessity.  This kid lives in Bushwick, for the time being, but shops in some other city’s version of SoHo.  I say all this to say the crowd in the backyard of Frog this past Saturday reminded me of either the adult children of the rather wealthy and even very rich, or in fact the parents themselves, that grew up in affluent suburbs or on an Upper Side, went to private schools, and now live in brownstones complain about their parents cars getting tickets when they occasionally borrow them and try street parking without the genealogical timesense of the locals.  I really didn’t get the impression that anyone here stayed in the city with a couple roommates during the first 6 months of the pandemic.  They can all afford $16, which is fine for them and is the same price as anywhere else to be fair, but that’s why the wine costs that much.  That and a normal bar makes most of its profit on well’s alcohol; shots and Gin and tonics and vodka sodas.  A bottle of well’s tequila is let’s say $17 for a litre which is like 32 oz which is like 16 shots aka drinks each for around $10.  That a materials cost of $1.20 sold at a 8x mark up.  This is why we can’t have nice things.  Or rather why they cost $16. The old restaurant adage is “the first glass pays for the bottle;” though the glass is not 333ml.  Anyway, I handed the kid his 13” Macbook Pro and he walked off with it in his bare hand like Kanye West in 2016. Also weirdly there was a fight at that harvest party.

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36 Wyckoff Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11237

An article on SwayNYC (an events posting site/app) recently called Carousel “Bushwick’s Newest 70’s Themed Bar.”  The name SwayNYC caught me off guard as well so I checked their oldest post and it was less than a year ago so they may not remember the club called Sway which was where Paul’s Casablanca is now and their legendary Smiths nights every Sunday.  In the title we are told 1) it is in the 2.34 square mile area of North Brooklyn known as Bushwick and 2) of all the 70’s themed bars this one is the newest.  How many of the bars in Bushwick are “70’s themed?”  How many of the bars that were bars in the actual 1970’s would we walk inside of and stop and think “ah perfect, the 70s.”  My friend and oft bar attending compatriot Sal, told me about a new (old) bar he found in Ridgewood that you can smoke inside of and the drinks are priced as if it were the 70’s and they serve sausages that are quite good.  Is this not also 70’s themed as it is from the 1970’s?  Think of what that designation means to you and picture a bar.  Is it one of these: Birdy’s, Ray’s, Ray’s 2, The Flower Shop, Twin’s, Carmelo’s, Goldie’s, Pony Boy, Coyote Club, Three Diamond Door, Do or Dive, JoyFace, The Johnson’s, etc?  Are these really 70’s themed or is it that they look like you’re in Ohio? Or more accurately in the Ohio of my mind’s eye.  Have the pandemic billboards advertising Ohio reached into our subconscious and incepted us?  These bars generally shy away from having a television unless it’s a television from the 70’s as is the case at the new Ray’s in Greenpoint. Someone there informed me they play “the game” there on it to which I wondered why I would want that.  I noticed for the first time in my lengthy experience at 169 Bar recently that the TV was playing a live sports game rather than an old film in technicolor from the 70’s or 60’s or earlier which gave me pause.  For as long as I’ve known 169, the venerable dive bar staple for probably generations and arguably New Orleans themed, never had a movie playing more current than Cocktail (1988) nor a song since Phil Collins No Jacket Required.  To see them drop one of these criteria made me wonder whether they are aware of all those other bars and what they are doing to try and popularize this aesthetic of old or 70’s or just pre iPhone pre Uber.  Walking into a bar that has decorated itself thusly reminds me of watching a spy or crime or detective film that is set in the 70’s for no reason other than to avoid having to write around the fact smartphones exist.  Another friend of mine Eddie previously lived in Milwaukee.  When they got off work they’d cross the street and hit the happy hour at a dive bar.  The bar offered a special: beer and a shot and a loose cigarette for $5.  That’s the theme I want.  “Welcome to Al’s Manhattan Bar where at happy hour you can get a beer and a shot and a cig and a bump for $20.”

My father and mother were in town for Christmas this past December; as has become the norm since both of my siblings joined me in New York.  My father 73 and his father, my grandfather, was a bartender. He turned 18 in 1968 which was the drinking age, in Pennsylvania, in 1968.  My father’s first experience of a bar was probably the bar my grandfather worked at.  It was the sort of place you drove your car to after a full day’s work or stopped into before a full night’s.  It was also sort of a bank as well because you could have your checks cashed there at the end of the week.  How could a small local bar have enough cash on hand to cover that many paychecks?  I am told common practice was to open a tab against the total and close out at the end of the weekend so they really didn’t wind up handing much currency out.  I took my mother and father to all the local spots I frequent.  We even hit a few in Bed Stuy and Fort Greene and Park Slope, some of which could be returned in a social media search for 70’s themed, and not once did my dad mention their decor so I had to ask.  I described the 70’s theming situation and he said “so in other words they are bar themed.  This is what bars have always looked like and still do.”  He is kind of right but I think to my father he does see a bar as a bar as a bar because to him bars are either for craft beer tasting or for alcoholics.  He did not like Alibi in Fort Greene I should say. I think he was likely most transported to the past by that dive and got flashbacks of a time where going to the bar could mean your father, the bartender, introduced you to your future boss at General Electric or a place to get too drunk and stay too drunk and one day you’re 60 having a stroke on the same stool.

Carousel is on the corner of Wyckoff and Starr and occupies two commercial plots.  There are two large bars: one horseshoe in front of you as you enter and another in the left side room that is half the length of the entire building only cut short by a sunken conversation pit on one end and the DJ booth at the far.  I assume just mentioning the phrase “conversation pit” is enough to get at least 20% of the readership curious to visit.  There is a similar enough set up in the basement of Flower Shop but I have never felt terribly comforted by the people lording above me peering down into my drink.  This conversation pit is set off to the side however so you don’t feel as oppressed.  Also it fills up quickly so don’t expect to be able to sit in it on a Friday if you didn’t go straight from the office.  The space is huge and circumnavigates an aquarium-like smoking section; encased in glass.  Walking clockwise past the long bar at 9 o’clock is a little lounge room with a DJ at a booth playing presumably, or at least aesthetically, vinyl in front of the basement living room set from That 70’s Show.  At 12 o’clock are two pool tables atop a congested neck of a hallway straddled by sniffly bathrooms on its shoulders.    Last I was there it was too busy to bother waiting for a game of pool but the tables seem fine.  They only take change and when my friend Sal first visited the change machine was broken so he had to walk around the block asking taco trucks for change but still came up a quarter short.  I went to the smoking section, which I was hoping would be like what you find in an Italian airport or maybe like the smoking room at Le Carmen in the Pigalle neighborhood of Paris; both of which are plexiglass houses with a loud fan.  Instead it was actually outside, which is technically better, so we got rained on.  A young adult girl asked me for a lighter in a foreign language I didn't immediately understand but something in my head told me I had heard it before.

“What was that?”

“Hast du ein Feuerzeug?”

“You need a light, yeah?”

“Do you know what language that is?”

“Ah .. I don’t know, Portuguese?”

“It’s German.”

She says it again.

“I mean yeah I have been to Germany but I don't speak it.”

The young adult man who was just telling me that he also went to film school, but now works for a real estate management company, which I took to mean a landlord surrogacy, butt in to say something to these three girls; under 10 years my junior. I took the opportunity to duck out.

An article on GrubStreet (now owned by New York Magazine) was recently titled A New Bar That Goes Back to The Basics; in reference to Carousel.  The writer, Tammie Teclemariam, expressed that “Carousel has become [her] go-to because there’s nothing flashy about it.” If you click that link you will see a picture of the DJ booth area replete with disco ball and spinning party light.  I am of two minds on this topic.  1) When did we decide flashy is so bad as to warrant unconditional avoidance?  And 2) This place feels set decorated to the umpteenth degree.  By comparison Thai Diner comes to mind.  Before it opened I thought it was a leftover set dressing for a TV show until the day I saw people eating in it. An experience similar to when you turn down a block with production vehicles and realize it has snowed but only on this one street.  At Carousel numerous bits of decor have been specifically placed just so yet still winds up feeling empty and anonymous.  I wrote a whole paragraph about this sensation mirrored in society, pop culture and politics etc but it was really annoying so I deleted it so instead here are some entries from my Notes app:

• Imagine Twins but Septuplets 

• I don’t really see many barbacks and there’s empty beers everywhere in a way reminiscent of frat parties

• Beers are reasonably priced which is especially good because I need to be drunk immediately

• The walls are all 3/4 inch piece of plywood. Someone opened a door near the bar and it looked like I could run through it like the Kool Aid man

• DJ is playing idk stuff 

• Dance floor kinda isn’t. Which is cute when it’s because there isn’t space but not when there is

• There’s a lot of kids with colds leaving the bathroom

• The conversation pit is cute and maybe where the adults are supposed to hide 

• They should put in a working phone booth

• If in 40 years I go to a bar with a 2000’s theme I will be very confused 

• I feel like actual NYC in the 70s was like “dive bar? no that’s where my dad went, and worked, we had blow that wasn’t only fentanyl free it was actually good and we didn’t know what STDs were. Why would we take the train to go stand in a fake bar in RIDGEWOOD?”

Lastly, one thing I did learn from that article is that the conversation pit can be reserved in advance because of course it can. Whenever I try to get a burger at Metrograph and it’s closed for a private event or I go to Fong’s and someone has rented it for their birthday I shed a single tear like the man in that commercial from the 70’s where the “Indian man” cries about pollution. Fun fact that actor is Italian.  Why in a world where I select my movie theater seat and make dinner reservations one month ahead of time exactly as they become available to me via Resy would I leave an evening out drinking up to chance?

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There are really only two types of Martinis: two but with a secret third.  There are the Bemelman’s Martini, which is really two martinis, and there’s the martini available at whatever your local bar is.  As for myself, Clandestino can make a good martini but I wouldn’t think to recommend it if asked; largely because I so seldomly get one myself.  Once, I was there with one of the bartenders, Paolo, and watched him order a martini from one of his coworkers, Sarah.  He took a sip, hung his head, sighed, and, in all sincerity, asked us “why didn’t you tell me Sarah makes a better martini than me?”  The secret third thing is a martini at Dynaco, in BedStuy, which is both a spiritual midpoint whilst furth enough its own to form the third point of a martini glass triangle.

I am having a hard time typing “Tigre” without putting “Le” in front of it.  I had been told it is Grace Jones themed but even with forewarning I don’t see how.  I was also told they would bum you a cig if you asked. They didn’t.  A friend who had been to Tigre before and told me of the “cigarette martini” and said it was described to her as “like you just kissed someone who was out for a smoke.”  This was more than enough to get me there as I did and still do need to know what that is.

“Two cigarette martinis please.”

“Oh I’m sorry we are actually out of the cigarette martini tonight.”

This was not an option I had expected.  In the bar world things don’t often run out no?  Especially the second menu item and calling card? A keg taps, occasionally, sure, but there’s always another beer. Or maybe you want a Paloma and that bar just doesn’t have grapefruit juice and you change your mind.  I momentarily consider that I have cigarettes and could bum them one if that would help but I return to the menu instead.  The menu describes, under “martini (by ratio),” the options “04 - to - 1, 08 - to - 1, 12 - to - 1, 16 - to - 1” and finally “01 - to - Nothing.”  In what I give them the benefit of the doubt of assuming is an endeavor to simplify the ordering of your truly unique and special martini of preference, they have created perhaps the most difficult and confounding bit of mathematics I have ever seen; famously I received an A in Calculus 2 during my brief stint as an engineering student.  What is even more infuriating is that every word in the entire menu is either written sans capitalization or COMPRISED ENTIRELY OF CAPSLOCKED TITLES OR DESCRIPTIONS, yet, the “N” in “01 - to - Nothing” is given the noticeable privilege of being uppercased.  If they had had the cigarette martini in stock all of what you just read could have been avoided and I wouldn’t have had to type all those pesky little dashes.  I quickly flip past the martini algorithm and past the wines-by-the-glass list, which is long, and arrive at cocktails and rub my eye to stop it from twitching.  The section features two lists titled “then” (classics) and “now.”  The “now” is 4 cocktails, two of which have names in French (cherchez le femme et se si bon), so we chose the two in English: the “mister softee SINGHANI, SAGE, PINA” and “foreign places BANANA EAU, COGNAC, NUTMEG.”  Stop me if you've heard this one before but years ago I coined a cocktail called The Banana Hammock, which is a Sidecar with banana liquor (get it?), and though I have seen similar takes put up here and there none have the courage to slip in a dick joke. 

The friend I have brought with me for this visit is wildly intoxicated.  She had met up with me after leaving her work holiday party so she is appropriately wasted.  She is the kind of wasted one gets on someone else’s dime.  She is the kind of wasted that one only can get when that dime is coming from the people who require you to go work, in an office, 5 days a week, for less than you know you are worth.  I ask her to touch the plant behind her, to see if it’s real or fake, and she genuinely can’t tell.  As soon as we walk in she does a bit of a physical comedy routine for the manager, who wore a gold dress and was very patient with us, but she did not realize she was seeing improv and therefore didn’t laugh.  She sat us and my friend immediately requested to be moved.  She is making me look like the responsible one but just barely as for the last 3 hours I was having many beers and many shots with my new friend Harold who I met because he was sitting next to me. He was in town from Italy, where he lives by a lake, and tells me he has kept his apartment here because it is rent controlled from 1990, when he moved in at 26, and is actually two merged apartments taking up the whole top floor of the building.  He tells me how he went to re-park his car on 9/11 (the one in 2001) because of alternate side parking “because it was a Tuesday” we both said in unison.  When he got back up to his 5th floor walk up he went out onto the fire escape to water his weed plants and saw the smoke engulfing the first tower and swirls of paper in the air and thought “are they making a movie?”  As he did he saw a plane moving low across the horizon and do a little turn and plow into the second tower with a sound he imitated with mouth as the air being sucked out of the room (shooooosh) followed by a bang (BANG).  This apartment just happened to be across the street from Tigre.

The bar feels like you are underground even though I knew very well I wasn’t as I walked in.  That being said, it really should be underground.  The door is a nondescript black service door covered in stickers and tags (coool) and the doorman is big and doorman-like.  “You gotta pretend to be a lot more sober than you are,” I say to my friend and she doesn’t.  The ceiling is subjectively low and adorned with differingly heighted elements of light and stalactitic flair.  There is a hotel on top of us, I assume is called The Rivington Hotel, and I feel submerged so the sum total reminds me more of a cruise ship than a speakeasy or lobby lounge or what have you.  

Everyone that works here is beautiful.  The bartenders are both feminine presenting as are the two servers and the manager and they are all quite attractive.  Soon they will all be kept far from us two drunken degenerates as manager is replaced by a server of model aspect with menus and eventually we are speaking with a tall individual with long brown hair that looks like Johnathon van Ness from Queer Eye when but when they don’t have a beard.  They are delightful and help me specify my wishes on my third cocktail.  Everyone here is in a uniform of sorts that reminds me of working with women in places where there were uniforms of the femininely accentuating variety.  They had a dress smock with 3 quarter sleeves and not terribly long hem that my coworkers would often complain about as some were tall and some weren’t and no one much liked having to bare leg when the rest of us were in pants and shirts.  Ultimately I didn’t stay working there long enough to see how it was resolved and it was the owner who had designed the garments so that may have made him bias.  The uniform at Tigre appears to be white, skin tight, and sans brassiere.  While I do not disapprove aesthetically, I was surprised since the environs don’t seem to necessitate, nor expect, such piquant livery.  I briefly approach the bar, where naturally I had initially requested to be seated but wasn’t able, and start bothering the bartenders.  I ask about some odd small blue bottle I see on the top shelf saying “what’s that up there it looks like aftershave?”  I am told it is a chartreuse of some sort.  I ask a second question about who knows what and they answer “I’m sorry sir we don’t take drink orders from the bar you’ll have to ask your server.”  Right yes true, I thank them for putting me down gracefully and realize this means that I am not only internally drunk but the rest of the world can tell.  I go back to the table, chug my second martini (the normal one at the top of the menu not the one requiring a degree in physics), and calmly walk to the bathroom, which even as I am doing it feels weird.  I had just had two martinis and a cocktail back to back to back and was feeling fine.  Surely after two martinis I should be feeling unwell.  They are $23 I deserve to be suffering afterwards.  I wonder why I don’t feel like hell in the bathroom as my phone starts to ring.  It is my compatriot saying “I just broke so many glasses.”  “I left you alone for 3 minutes what happened!”  I return to find several serveresses, on hands and knees, with towels and shards.  The check is dropped, sans demande, tout suite.  Were their martinis stronger I can only assume we would have been arrested.  Instead we went to Thee Parkside, who were very much going to close early had we not walked in, and then to Sophie’s, where I am told I played pool, and, as un pièce de résistance, went to friend’s house with her and her boyfriend until 7 in the morning and slept on their guest bed.  The next day was not my favorite.

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I take no pleasure in admitting it but I don’t like “art books.”  I don’t place photography or painting or architecture books on my coffee table.  Glossy mags on fashion and culture and personalities hold my attention for about as long as it would take to wait in line to buy one.  I don’t get excited to hear Phaidon or Taschen has done another project with David Hockney to accompany another retrospective at the MET or is re-releasing something from Wolfgang Tillmans previously out of print. I have been to Dashwood twice.  A published photographer friend of mine, who was once Miwa’s customer-of-the-day, once bragged to me how he had purchased a rare Daido Moriyama photo book from a schmuck at school for such a low price he liken it to theft.  He informed me it could be flipped online for a healthy profit.  This news was so uninteresting to me the only reason I’m able to remember it now is I filed it in my memory under “J***: the low down capitalist pig.”  I have been to NY Art Book Fair several times but just for the people watching.  I say this to all to ask: how was it I had such a lovely time at a bar which I can most simply describe as “walking into an art book about artsy bars.”  The bar looks like an apartamento pop-up shop; the design elements compiled from Pinterest board clippings of De Stijl.  It looks like the kind of place AirBnB would do a blog post about titled “Shoreditch Designer Bar Prescribes Cocktails by the Bottle;” despite the fact it’s not in Shoreditch.  The bar is so “not me,” but perhaps 15 lefts make a right.

A Bar With Shapes For A Name is located at the southernmost edge of what is still probably considered Dalston.  The shapes in question are some of the most popular ones: a triangle, a square, and a circle.  These shapes are reproduced throughout the furnishings, decor, menu, and service elements.  My first drink, a vodka milk punch, comes with a frozen block containing a shimmery prismatic cube.  The triplet appears again as negative spaces in a fist of ice in something whiskey based.  On a waist high mid century modern credenza is a slide projector throwing onto the wall a canary yellow triangle, a Golden Gate orange square, and a Byzantine violet circle.  If you haven’t had an alcoholic milk punch before I suggest you click the above link and go find the nearest to your home; unless you live in London in which case go here.  It tastes like your tongue is doing that trick of ripping out the tablecloth without disturbing the stemware atop, but as if the table cloth were made of otter fur.

My friend Owen and I are received at the front door by a host who assigns us seats.  This is because their beverage delivery system, if not requiring it, lends itself to table service.  At the front are high tops and stools for 2-6.  The bars service areas in at the center left, a through passage at middle, and long couch backed with a length of mirror on the right.  In the back are three long cafeteria tables that mimic a school lunchroom in miniature.  Owen and I are sat on the couch, facing the bar, on either side of a circular platform supported by a rail snaking up the front bottom of the cushions.  At the opposite end of the couch is Eric Andre.  He didn’t do anything weird or nothing, he was just, like, on a date and though I’ve never met him in Brooklyn, as many of my friends and ex-girlfriends have, I always assumed I would one day, at Hotel Delmano or Achilles Heel, but not in London when I hadn’t even planned on being there in the first place.

Being at an assigned seat made me antsy as I am used to standing at the end of the bar between the bar back and the iPhone chargers.  Owen and I kept getting up and walking around.  We met years ago at Beverly’s Bar on Essex St when he was the visitor so he wanted to introduce me to everyone as this was his favorite neighborhood spot as Beverly’s was mine.  He brought us here, on a Sunday night at 01:00 am, when it seems every other restaurant or bar worker has convened for one last weekend sip.  We kept nearly missing our drinks being hand delivered to our seats, causing the server to fret over the lack of our compliance with how things are done here.  A Bar With Shapes For A Name is a bit of a neighborhood in miniature.  Each is patron is given their temporary residence address (Couch #3) and is welcome to visit their neighbor’s at theirs so long as they return to procure incidentals and manage the upkeep of their tabs.  The drinks are all pre-batched and arrive in little capped glass bottles and jars; mixologically speaking this is their thing.  The pre-made units of spirits in containers eliminates the risk of spillage and the appropriate glassware arrives either empty (if served up) or with ice onto which you are to pour said pre-concocted concoctions. They have beer as well, but not on tap.  Logistically, the combination of these elements renders the bar counter itself rather unimportant: it needn’t be large to accommodate countless liquor bottles as most drinks are already made, nor does the civilian side possess many stools.  The show is not happening behind the bar, the “show” happened earlier, in the daytime, in the basement, at a mixing station.  The staff of bartenders, on the curiously busy Sunday night I visited, are therefore able to dart to and fro whenever the tab might take them like so many final mile subcontractors in their variously colored pastel coveralls (that’s the uniform).

Downstairs in the basement, the materials are more synthetic - aluminum and glass and black lacquered walls and industrial refrigerators.  While upstairs there are handsome wooden shelves and little cutesy adornments like a futzy lamp or a little pot of flowers, the basement is more noir bringing to mind peering through Venetian blinds towards a dusky hairpin corner as an automobile passes, briefly striping your face with a tingle of frisson.  The sort of place you aren’t seen rather caught.  In the deep bottom back is a lab table with a bevy of scientific looking instruments: pipettes, mixing machines, beakers, tubing, automated shakers, measuring vessels, clipboard.  I assume some sort of statistical analysis approximates how many martinis or negronis or vodka milk punches are to be ordered each night.  I imagine James Bond walking up to a lab coat adorned drink chef to order the lychee martini - Agitated, not centrifuged.

Eventually it is time to smoke cigarettes.  As we stand out front looking back into A Bar With Shapes For A Name I realize how small it looks from the street; especially so in a town known for its grand ol’ pubs.  It is a bright little square cleaved between two businesses the dealings of which aren’t apparent afterhours.  The bar is just out of place enough to suspect it may be invisible to those who aren’t the drinking type; shielded by some Diagonical hex.  I couldn’t help but observe the pleasant aura of the night.  Drinks were delivered with a smile, a bartender and I had a long conversation about milk punch, the guy took PayPal, and even Eric Andre’s date seemed to be going well.  Just then appeared 8 of Owen’s coworkers and friends having just gotten off work at the elevated pub restaurant, called The Marksmen, where Owen is the private dining room manager.  One of the drunker ones spots me from a few paces out, walks up to me and says “hey you’re an actor right?”

“Ah, I have acted.”

“Yeah.  I recognize you from that one show.”

“I mean I suppose that’s technically possible.”

Is it though?  I wonder.  

A moment later a woman turned to us and said she thought Owen and I were very good looking and asked if we were a couple.  I apologized and told her we were not and she was mildly heartbroken.  It was slight, like as much as if I had eaten her leftovers, but had I known beforehand I could surely have planted one on Owen on account of how nice everyone was being it seemed wrong not to.  The conviviality and assumptions of television credits admittedly buoyed my feeling about A Bar With… More than enough to garnish the hour and a half of alcoholic supplements, we had already imbibed, and spill over some glee to my new friends.  We snuck down to make communion at the conference sized table in the basement and spent a couple hours getting to know each other over a game of Truth or Dare; a sort of seance of the still living.  I guess in a bar decentralized, with no shaking behind it nor a DJ booth, you only have each other to look to.

As for the name, maybe the place does deserve to be purposefully different sounding.  However if you type those three shape emojis into your maps app you certainly will not find A Bar With Shapes For A Name; so maybe this is really “A Bar With Shapes For A Name For A Name.”  It rings better than “Pig & Whistle” or “McClusky’s & Arms” but it bears mentioning.  A friend of mine the other day said he doesn’t go to any bar with an ampersand.

Edit: it has come to our attention the name of the establishment is derived from the book “The ABCs of 🔶🟥🔵: The Bauhaus and Design Theory” edited by Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller and published by Princeton Architectural Press, Inc. in 1991.  So it was Bauhaus, not De Stijl, but I did warn you design compendiums aren’t within my purview.

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In 2014, on the Highline, directly underneath the Standard Hotel, was an art installation consisting of 3 bodega style refrigerators, with big glass doors, containing many multi-colored fresh pressed juice bottles, with strange labels listing their ingredient contents.  Two such labels read “bottle service: wall street journal, windex, champagne, foreign currency, vodka, salmon roe, sea salt” and “minimum wage: mr. clean, money order, medical scrubs, french fries, toilet paper, phone card, latex gloves, pennies,” respectively.  The artist’s name was Josh Kline and the name of the piece was titled “Skittles.”  The Winnie’s smoothie would be something like: “half pack of cigarettes, two bumps cocaine, $5 dollar bill, four small square pieces of paper, tequila shot, golf pencil, Juul pod, half can Asahi, lime wedge garnish.”  The blended up, murky concoction should then be poured into a neon green plastic bottle and split five ways between yourself, two close friends, and two complete strangers you’ve only met because they also know the words to Sisqó’s “Thong Song.”

I have had some proud moments at Winnie’s and some not so, but am more willing to accept either fate there than at most other karaoke establishments.  Recently, the owner of Winnie’s, Winnie, went through a cancellation of sorts for rudely directing a transwoman towards the men’s room with the point of a finger as she sat drinking at the end of the bar in a chair she seems to be occupying less lately than she used to.  When asked, Winnie’s diverse staff responded, in kind, stating “Yeaaaahhh I mean it is bad but she’s an old Chinese woman who grew up in under Mao.  She doesn’t really know about all that.  She doesn’t even really speak English.”  There is a proudly displayed photograph of Winnie with Bill Clinton above the antique cash register behind the bar.

Once, and with a high level of accuracy, my friend Will and I did an excellent rendition of OutKast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad.”  We wondered how it was us two white guys from suburbs, in California and Texas, respectively, hadn’t known until then of each other's affinity for the fastest song on Stankonia (2000).  The further into the song we so accurately sang, the more we began to feel ourselves. Until, a young Middle Eastern woman rose in protest informing us her friend is Iraqi and currently in attendance.  She asked us who it was exactly we thought we were.  Our friend Rishika rushed in between to liaise on our behalf.  Thinking it better not to engage, and without any obvious valid argument to pose, and still having quite a bit more song left to rap, we maintained focus to finish at what I would estimate was 98% accuracy; were it Guitar Hero and taking into account a couple purposeful omissions.  Afterwards, we reflected.  We knew not the exact politics of Big Boy nor Andre 3000 but surely they weren’t in favor of the Gulf War, nor George Bush Sr.  But surely the young woman didn’t know any of our’s either so perhaps it wouldn’t be in her interest to assume two strange white men from suburbs, in California and Texas, respectively, chanting into microphones “Bombs over Baghdad” didn’t mean it literally.  The song did come out in 2000, a year before 9/11, and 3 years before Bush Jr. had our government lie to everyone so the west could re-invade Iraq, but, that being said, context is key.

Regardless of what key you sing in on the party lit stage floor of Winnie’s, regardless of what brand of cigs you smoke or variety of nose beers you partake of, regardless of which bathroom you use or table booth you throw your jackets onto, the only thing more cacophonous than a packed Winnie’s is the headache you will have the next day.  Please return the mics after your song, don’t forget to tip your bartenders, $20 let’s you skip the line, and if there's something in the song you wouldn’t say in front of your HR rep then best not to say it into a microphone in front of thirty strangers regardless of how the Youtube karaoke lyrics read for Chief Keef’s “Don’t Like.”

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p.s. - Fun Fact! Winnie’s opened in 1987 and was originally on Bayard street, until 2015, when the landlord leased the store front to Mexican restaurant Lalito, booting Winnie. Lalito begat Lalo, which closed, and ultimately the address became Dr. Clark’s.

Recently, though I didn’t know it before hand, I went to Martin to buy a pair of rubber slides and a tee shirt with writing on it from my dear friend Jack stating “They fucked my wife at Martin and all I got was this lousy tee shirt.” Many years ago another friend of mine, Natalie, worked here when she first moved to Paris and attributes to it the expediency with which she learned French. She had to host, serve, cook a bit, and wash the dishes. The first night back in Paris on this trip I had a conversation with friends, local and foreign, about whether to refer to it as a restaurant or a bar.  It does of course serve food, though in Paris that is not particularly rare, and it has a range of wines, beer and hard alcohol and past kitchen hours is most certainly exercised as a bar. Friday night we tried unsuccessfully to finish all of their orange wine on tap and I was stuck with a bill so high they felt obligated to take off a couple bottles.

I find myself here now in a bit of a state of travel fatigue. I am solo and not yet ready to leave for Greece and stopped in thinking perhaps a familiar occurrence would occur again. That is running into a New Yorker I didn’t expect to see in town. Being solo for once affords me a different perspective on the evening. There are copious amount of conversation around me; as if all persons are talking at once. Inside the bar counter is packed with people and topped with restaurant supplies so you have to come around the side nearly behind the bar to order as if you work here and need to sneak a mid shift shot. I asked one of the owners for the sandals I saw displayed on the wall, baring their name, and whilst purchasing felt maybe the price tag would include me needing to wash a few plates. It isn’t so different from many other places but has been decided upon as being special by all in attendance. The exterior wall is all windows so it opens up to the world so that the bar is the restaurant is the sidewalk is the street. The street we are on is wider than most and further from a tabac than I would like. There are at least as many people standing outside outside as there are sitting in the interior or in between. No prevailing dress code other than to say “people in their thirties who pay rent” and the dominant tongue is French.

When I first visited Paris, years ago, we managed to get a reservation, or maybe we just came early, and we had dinner. Small plates to share and we were straight forwards about the affair; didn’t linger, ate, paid, and left. I am reminded of Jack’s girlfriend Thelma stating (through Jack’s paraphrasial) how she does not like sharing plates. “I want my own food.” I remember there being deep fried duck parts I quite liked. In a comically French way they have a cocktail on menu called a spicy gin and tonic as if no one this side of the world knows what tequila is, let alone mescal. The line between smoking outside and smoking inside is a satire of bureaucratic proportions. I see a few faces I recognize and start to wonder what other places there are that act like this. In my neighborhood, I have Clandestino, for instance, but I know there are other bars and people and communities and neighborhoods in other zones or boroughs even. Surely some other bar is someone else’s Martin because I know for a fact there are more than 30 people in Paris. It has a different quality of requirement however. Clandestino I chose, but Martin is chosen for me. Is there a liquor committee that designates bars per area per person per type per place? Like the city mandate that a baguette never cost more than €2, is there another deciding I should have affiliations here? I dont even live here. There is a bus stop directly in front but no one that gets off even seems to acknowledge Martin’s existence. The demographic has a standard deviation less than what I am used to in New York but matched in its quasi uniformity by it’s countenance. I can’t imagine someone getting kicked out of here. It closes at 2:00 am and isn’t too far from a late night bar called Le Connetable where I can imagine and have seen people kicked out of; last night at 3:00 am for instance. I have text alerted all pertinent parties as to my where abouts and if luck would favor me one of them might join but until then I’ll be staring into the middle distance smoking a pack of Marlboro Reds I bought from a alimentation for 15€ because I thought he said 10€ and I didn’t know the brand yet and I was being a dummy.

Ps - Martin is pronounced Mar-ton

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I’ve been to Lola and I have been to Mehanata and I have been to Bella Ciao and surely there are others I am now forgetting.  These are locales at which Travis Bass has installed parties, only for a little while a piece, but the candle which burns twice as bright burns half as long.  Once the party turns stale (and this time always comes) then *poof* they’re gone.  The old shelter wanes silently, unobserved, until a few months or a season later a flier arrives in your DMs.  Occasionally this is pondered from the interior of the next host of this ongoing party organism; not grown too large for its shell, rather tires easily of its surroundings.  By this point the old is forgotten and you are in the basement of a restaurant on Mulberry you are fairly sure you’ve heard the name of but never actually been to.

“It’s called Bella Ciao.”  

“I thought it was Ciao Bella?”  

“No but there’s a place on 7th Ave called that but it’s just an Italian restaurant.”

“But this is just an Italian restaurant.”

“No, this is a party.”

Initially this feels a bit like your friend's parent’s house while they’re out of town; except in this case the venue is complicit in inciting the extra patronage.  The exact chronology of events isn’t so important, as it is iterative, but my experience of the last few forums goes as follows: first, there is cause for a happening.  Perhaps it is the fashion week party of a downtown arts/culture magazine or a particularly popular person in the nightlife milieu is having a birthday.  Either will work fine.  Concurrently you hear murmurings of a new club and even whispers of the name *travis*.  

“There’s a new club night on Mulberry.”  

“You mean Bella Ciao?”

“No Manero’s.”

“What’s Manero’s?”

“It’s an Italian place on Mulberry.”

“Bella Ciao?”

“No Manero’s.”

“I don’t know about Manero's.”  

A friend tells you to come to a party on a Tuesday or Wednesday, or maybe even a Thursday, for the inner sanctum of whichever group is relevant.  Maybe you are directly invited, by the progenitor, to which you RSVP as the hairs on the back of your texting hand stand straighter.  *if im not listed… will i get in?*  There may even be more than one of these ‘pre-opening’ events.  There are, after all, several different crowds to be courted.  For a week or two many birthdays and fliers of DJ’s will result.  Once each group is sure it has been let in before the laymans they will have forgotten there was a time they didn’t know there’s a party in a pizza place, just north of Canal on Mulberry, called Manero’s.  “There’s a party there again?  I can’t go twice in one week,” you say as you climb into the back seat of an Uber to Manero’s.

Manero’s has been in business since the summer of 2019, owed to the combined efforts of the two guys from JaJaJa (and Gelso & Grand also on Mulberry at Grand), and a guy from the Regina’s Grocery chain.  More recently, yet before my having been made awares, Manero’s expanded beyond a single storefront slice shop to a larger restaurant.  At the left side door you will find a fresh faced man of 22 checking IDs with a nonchalance such to make you question your own credentials.  Inside are four raised, cozy, wooden booths, on your left, with stained glass pendant light fixtures reminding you(me) of your(my) family kitchen in the 90’s.  Past those is a bar not all together large but ample in supply; including those red plastic water cups I remember sneaking Root Beer into at Straw Hat Pizza after little league games as a tween.  Behind this is a dining room outfitted for dancing, replete with booth for DJ and tables and chairs arranged looking onto the dance floor for pleasant chatting.  In some old interviews and profiles written about Travis Bass and his accomplices (links to which you can find on his website in his IG bio), I find several descriptions of the common base of ingredients to his curated festivities.  Often a quiet area where one can chat without screaming.  A dance floor of course where music “has to be amazing.”  Places that afford the opportunity of some third thing that’s unexpected are preferred.  In one venue years ago was a mirror wrapped karaoke room for instance.  Also he has, continually, reminded his interviewers of the importance of the crowd and, to paraphrase, a bit of everyone and a people from all walks of life, etc, variety is the spice of.  Behind the dance floor an outside smoking area (which closes early) and in the far back a little satellite bar in a tiny in-law unit of sorts that later in the night the operators of Manero’s seem to half forget about and I on more than one occasion have availed myself of their bar services sans a tender in attendance.

At some point the party, the place and the people become a perpetual motion machine.  Does the original host check in every week?  Surely not as I would assume he is a busy man with his obligations pulling him elsewhere.  What was their involvement in this endeavor to popularize partying at Manero’s?  I know not, but as his was the DM which first alerted me, I’ve taken license here to extrapolate.  The party continues with more or less the vibe fomented by those initial forays intact.  However, at some point something does change.  I don’t remember the last time I went to Manero’s.  I don’t mean the last time ever, although, now I am wondering if it has already happened.  Has the party there ended and I was just too distracted by the lovely spring-into-summer weather to have noticed?  The timing of this would make sense.  I have been present, at Manero’s, in each of the last three seasons, and my first visit was for my friend Mitch’s birthday and Mitch is a Scorpio.  Has the dancing there stopped?  If I am inclined to do so, where would I instead venture?  And don’t say Brooklyn.

It isn’t a negative upon Manero’s, nor Travis’s eptitude for temporary clubs of a similar flair, that it should shoulder the weight of our communal need for clubbing, but it does have me wondering why must a pizza place do it?  So great is the lack of club, physically, many a bar or restaurant in possession of a basement is starting to convert.  For example, the miniature dance floor below Le Dive, with a disco ball barely high enough to walk under and a coat check, DJ booth and bathroom all built on top of one another, routinely hosts a scrum of evening revelers squirming for room to shimmy an elbow.  Rumor has it the people behind Parcelle are looking to do the same in what used to be Ming’s Cafe.  Most of the old downtown spots are either closed, no longer cool, or very inconvenient to get into with any great regularity.  The Box for example can be a tough one.  One sure fire way is to be an employee, or rich or know someone (who is one of those aforementioned things).  Come to think of it, when was the last time I was at Paul’s? - Baby Grand, not Casablanca.  In either case it was to see a friend DJ or because they were hosting and therefore had a table.

Whilst I am aware of the prevalence of clubs and dancing venues in Brooklyn I am not considering them as preferable options here because they are not easy, in neither theory nor execution, and often require forethought.  A venue to be truly great must be able to be “wound up at.”  Bushwick/Brooklyn clubs aren’t not fun but there are so many of them very little stands out.  Do you want a “Berlin-ish” thing?  Go to Basement.  Do you want some Paradise Garage-y cosplay?  Go to Nightmoves. Do you want to spend $60 on entry to a generic time in a really big warehouse?  House of Yes, Brooklyn Mirage, Avant Gardner, Nowadays, Elsewhere, the list goes on and on.  Are there organized rave-like events with a ticket?  Yes and those are fun but you have to purchase a ticket in advance and they usually aren’t on a Tuesday.

There will always (hopefully) be the sort of locally great and regionally specific spots like East Village’s Nu Blu and Myrtle Broadway’s Bossa Nova but you can tell they are becoming rarer (in my attendance not their existence) because those places have become busy enough to open satellite locations.  Nu Blu has a new Nu Blu up the street and has started referring to the original location as Nu Blu Classic.  Bossa Nova opened a new club called Paragon right down the street as well.  I am not sure which is closest to its older sibling but if any one wants to bet we could make a wager of it.  The infamous The Box has created another The on 57st street and 8th Ave titled The Stranger.  I went once around when it opened and waited dutifully in line.  Four of my five friends left and went to a dive bar, while my lone comrade and I stood 40 minutes to be admitted; only as a result of a person of interest arriving and waving us in.  Have you been to a raver commune house in East Oakland in 2011?  It looks like that but much more expensive, larger, and presumably up to building code.

As for the Bass helmed endeavors: is it a sure fire win?  No.  Have I had a great time at them?  Yes, of course.  Is it a prisoner's dilemma in which we all agree this is fun and make it the hip spot and dance for as long as it keeps working?  That may just be what we have to live with right now.  It is however keeping alive a lineage of party pop-up stretching back to the fabled Manhattan megaclub days of old, aka the 90’s, by leapfrogging from one Chinese restaurant to a Romanian tri-level club to a several times failed East Village bar to a pizza restaurant on Mulberry down the street from an Italian restaurant on Mulberry.  This may just be the only way in current rental, regulatory, and corporate climate in which the seed of a thing called nightlife stays planted (or repotted and cloned I should say? Grafted onto a new branch?).  Let’s hope this bloodline isn’t Habsburgian.  We may be in the middle of the short time span in which we forget where it was we used to dance.  Before we know it we’ll be back in the basement/backroom/attic/kitchen of a Russian tea room or a Ukrainian community center or perhaps a dim sum ballroom?  Has anyone taken over the lease at the old Jing Fong yet?  I am told Manero’s has good pizza, so I will probably be back soon, but with an appetite.

560 Manhattan Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11222

PERMANENTLY CLOSED

I don’t remember which of the evenings at Enid’s would have been my first and to be honest the ones I do remember are foggy at best.  I remember being surprised to see a friend behind the bar whom I knew as a bartender at Mr. Fong’s (which was new at the time).

“Bobby! You work here?!”

“Yeah bro you saw me here two weeks ago and said the same thing.”

“I did?”

Or maybe my first time was when I met up with a friend fresh to New York from Long Beach California and we were doing so much poppers on the dance floor the people adjacent to us started to complain of headaches.  Or maybe the first time was the night after work Cam and I stopped by his house on the way to Enid’s and he came out of his room having changed into the same thing I was wearing: white pants, red Hawaiian shirt, black Chucks.  

“Really dude?”

“What.”

“We’re not going matching.  Put back on what you had back on.  You looked fine.”

“No dude this’ll be fun.”

“We look like a cartoon version of The Birdcage.”

“So?”

Wait - then we went to Enid’s and met my friend Yvette from Long Beach.  Did we then do poppers?  Was that all the same night?  Or was that every night I went to Enid’s?

Enid’s was a favorite of everyone that could be considered a Greenpoint’er back in that time, which was different then what it would be today.  Tattoos, because they know all the artists, skateboard, because they were out filming that day, motorcycle, that they built themselves, graff, because duh, and let’s say vintage, because it was still cheap and late aughts hipsterism hadn’t fully worn off.  As opposed to today: tattoos, paid for expensive stick and pokes, skateboard(long), because that’s how they get around this 4 block section of the neighborhood which is seldom left, motorcycle, but like a new one, graff, actually probably stickers with QR tag to start up website, and vintage, because they own a boutique.  Enid’s was a spot for the almost 30 version of the almost 21 year olds across the street at bar Matchless.  This was a different place where A Bar was called No Name and Pony Boy’s was a piano bar/resto called the Manhattan Inn.  Since Enid’s closure I suspect its old clientele must have to settle for Pony Boy where at least you can dance or rough it at Twin’s where you cannot.  Although, to be honest they are all close to 40 now and probably all live in Crown Heights.  Enid’s was not a place to stand idly.  It had a large L shaped bar at the far back left, looking in from the front door, which was for the most part for ordering quickly and scurrying back to the floor or sneaking a quick shot with Bobby.  Behind the bar in the back center was a couple graffiti and sticker ridden bathrooms that were also mostly for doing drugs or hooking up.  Let’s say 33.3%-33.3%-33.3% drugs-pee-hookup.  The rest of the room was I feel like made all out of wood.  Old wood?  Paint that hadn’t been touched up in a while?  Have you been to London?  They have many pubs that fit this description: corner store front, big, old wood bar, highish ceiling, etc.  The L shape of the room created by the L shaped bar jutting out meant the dance floor and bar and front door to bar to bathroom lane never interfered with each other.  To the right side under a wall of window were a series of tables and chairs that serviced the restaurant during the day and were pushed up against the wall at night if it was busy with dancing youths which it usually was.  Something about rents being cheaper seems, now in retrospect, to have made dancing spaces more prevalent.  The need for higher prices and more drinkers wasn’t so high so perhaps more space could be used for dancing, an activity that requires no purchase and therefore nets no profits.  Somewhere was a DJ station I don’t remember where and as far as a menu I only ever ordered Pacificos and shots of Tequila so I really couldn’t tell you.

I do however remember the last time I was at Enid’s.  I met up with a girl there that I had known for about two years.   She was back in town, from London, visiting and we met there for brunch on her last day in town.  

“How is it I’ve been back three times in the last two years and you haven’t visited us in London once?”

I was on my third drink and pulled out my phone and bought a one way to London right then and there.  The reason I hadn’t sooner was I never had had the money to do so but since I had just received an insurance payout at the time, from when I got hit by a car, I was flush; but that’s a different story altogether.  We met one summer day two years prior, through another English friend, in McCarran Park and spent most of her last month in New York together.  She had spend a year here in culinary school then stayed for a summer to stage at the restaurant Blue Hill at Stone Barns.  When she left she promised she’d be back in a couple months so it never really felt like goodbye. 

We spent the first few days of this trip together as well until ultimately the water boiled over.  I met her at Clandestino after her and her girlfriends had a birthday dinner at Estela.  I found them at a back table giggly and tipsy.  She was in a patterned aqua and turquoise halter top and trouser set that made her look like a mermaid if not for the long legs. She was already at least as tall as me so she towered over me in heels as we scampered over to Beverly’s for another shot and back to my place for what was probably twenty minutes.  We paddled out onto enticing azure waters only to be called back to shore. Sorry, what I mean is she remembered she has kinda started seeing someone back in London.  “We should really be being much more responsible than this.”  In retrospect I think it wasn’t so much a “thing” rather they had been dating dating for a bit of time.  I did not know the context of their relationship but I would get a bit of an idea of it when I went to London 2 months later.  I never met the man.

Even after she had left town, all of my little buddies at the bar asked me one by one “who was that tall blonde you were in with last week?” Or “I hear you brought a mermaid here on Thursday?”  I didn’t originally come up with that mermaid comparison.  Only for this do I mention that before chefing she was a model of some repute.  She told me stories of tabloids and the guitar collection of a Beatle offspring.  She told me how a single day of work on an ad for a middle eastern airline paid her entire year’s rent while here in New York cooking.  I was brand new to New York and dazzled by her.  Not that I wouldn’t have been otherwise that just happened to be the chronology of it.  Once she said “sorry I’m late I was just coming from my friends apartment and I know Taylor Swift lives in the building so I kept riding the elevator to see if I would run into her.”

“Your friend lives in the same building as Taylor Swift? Who are they Orlando Bloom?”

“…. Who told you?”

“I’m right? I was guessing.”

Someone tries to scout her for a shoot as we sit eating Huevos Rancheros and drinking Bloody Mary’s at Enid’s.  We have quite a few rounds of these and Pacificos and tequila shots.  To be honest I thought I could hang but when I do eventually see her and her friends in LondonI realize what a difference the drinking training of those who grow up English with warm pints and Desperados truly makes (she informs me many an English child’s first drunk is on Sambuca).  One night in New York we went out and I wanted to introduce her to Four Loko.  We split one.  I puked and she remained, at least outwardly, sober.  

“Are you represented by anyone?”

“I used to be.  I don’t live here though I live in London. If you’re able to pay my full rate and fly me out here then I would be interested but otherwise.”

“Ok right sorry we don’t have that in the ….”

She affected a seriousness of tone and a stiff intonation I had not heard come from her before.  We ate and drank and talked.  We kept telling the server we’re still working on it when asked if we want our plates cleared.  I let all the ice in my Bloody Mary melt and drank it further making it stretch like adding water to the last bit of dish soap.  We ordered beers and then another that sat there getting warm.  Neither of us was prepared for this meal to come to its terminus.   I had to go do something important at the time which is entirely unmemorable now.  She had to go join some 2nd tier friend’s birthday party that would culminate with a trivia night in south Brooklyn somewhere.  “If you want you can definitely join us if you are done with (whatever I was doing) in time?”

“I’m not sure if I’ll be done with (some dumb unimportant thing) in time but yeah. If you wanna get a drink after though when you get back to my neighborhood let me know.”

“I will do. I have to fly out pretty early tomorrow morning but I’ll let you know.”

We paid the bill at Enid’s and walked out onto Manhattan Ave.  As we walked closer to Nassau, and further from Driggs, the empty spaces in our conversation grew longer and more frequent.  We arrived at some invisible but seemingly previously agreed upon X on the sidewalk.  We both landed on our marks, turned to face, and held that moment in abject stillness.  What could we say?  We both knew this was the end of the past and the last moment before whatever the future was to be.  Sure I would see her in London in a month or so’s time but there we would be playing two different characters in an unrelated play sharing no locations, sets, nor even a story universe; merely talent for a different credit.  I welled up inside with all manner of expression and could from the look in her eyes sense she did the same but out loud all we said was “see you later”s knowing well this was the last time these two versions of ourselves would exist.  With a hug and a kiss, then another and another, we parted, turning back to look again just to make sure a few times on each end, each more gut wrenching than the last.  Steam building in my body gurgling up little burps to my mind popping cartoon bubbles with the words “turn around” and “go back.”  Instead the pressure leaked out as a salty trails down each cheek.  I got on the subway.  I stood there for a time outside of time and slowly heard the sounds of the city returning to my ears.  The bing bonging door of the G.  Someone’s iPhone playing music.  The rushing wind of an incoming Brooklyn bound train.  Soon I would be hitting my alarm to snooze before work tomorrow.  Soon I would be again stretching my cash tips till the next invoice gets filled. Later I’d get on a plane to Heathrow and exchange some of that cash at an airport teller only to find out they rip you off massively.  I would see her there but she’d be someone else.  This would be the London version of her not the one on vacation in New York.  We would drink on the tennis courts in Peckham and I’d have my first Desperados like a highschooler.  We’d go bowling at Elephant Circle and get pissed in London Fields while pasty pale English men lay shirtless in the sun because the weather, I am told repeatedly is “never this nice” and how “lucky (I am) to have come this week.”  We’d have vegetarian Sunday roast but we’d never experience again a moment like the one we had set on that spot a stone’s throw from the front door of Enid’s.  Those people we didn’t know any more but I do remember that was the last time I went to Enid’s.  I was saddened to hear Enid’s left without me having been able to properly say goodbye.  To express want for reckless abandon one more time without having to confront the explanations of ourselves and whether we’d both feel better having things said out loud.  Not sure what’s popped up in its place now.  She went on to marry that boyfriend and they have a little toddler now.

295 Grand St, Brooklyn, NY 11211 (allegedly)

Annoyingly, Nightmoves is not on Google Maps.  You can find a listing for “Daymoves,” the name given to the exact same place but during the daylight hours for coffee service, which has been labeled temporarily closed since the beginning of the pandemic.  I was reminded of the Bob Seger song when Googling this and I am playing it now as I type and think of all the hours I spent playing GTA: San Andreas which included “Night Moves” on Radio Los Santos.  Spiritually I am now cruising in a stolen ambulance through the California inspired interiorscape of that digital environment, so well recorded in my mind, as I reminisce or more accurately try to remember what happened the last time I went to Nightmoves.

Before I arrived I was already pondering a tricky question.  Nightmoves is in actuality a tiny club.  How does one distinguish between a bar, a lounge, a club, a “place,” or merely a drinking establishment that happens to be home to a light up dance floor?  Do you have to spend a lot of money there in order to be comfortable or enjoy yourself?  Do you have to plan ahead to be partaking of drugs?  Should I be changing into my dancing shoes and a disco shirt in advance?  Some say “why would you go to the club sober?  What would be the fun in that?” Many others know that dancing under the cover of semi darkness and blinking lights can be almost childlike in its innocence and see no need to cloud it with substances.   Still “some places exist to be safe places to do drugs” and drugs are fun.  Sure, not that Nightmoves is that but some venues of dance are.  Raves in a rented or unrented illegal place, the basement of a building perhaps, or Basement the club that’s a basement in a basement called Basement - all places where drugs are often a motivating factor.  Generally these places are ticketed or a cover is required at the door but otherwise everyone gets in given available space.  Maybe a long line but otherwise yes.  Do you think Berghain let everyone in before it got so famous?  Probably not but I do wonder. Not enough to pull up Reddit, or what have you, but a bit.

In this respect Nightmoves has more in common, than would immediately seem likely, with another famously popular Brooklyn location.  I’m sure you have heard of it, if not been to it and/or if not been to it 1000 times and/or if not hopped into a cab to it at 2am, from the city, purely because you were too drunk to turn down a free cab to a club nowhere near your (my) apartment: Bossa Nova.  Bossa has its own rubric for proper and successful execution of attendance.  Is it Thursday through Saturday?  Get there before midnight (early I know) and get the stamp.  Bring some extracurriculars and drink the cucumber water, etc.  Or are you one of those with a member card?  Not the most complicated things to do but does require you to move with intention and commit at least somewhat to the idea that you really want to be there and are not just winding up.  Nightmoves is somewhat similar in requirement of intent as it’s usually billed a private event, unlisted on Google maps, has a doorman, has a list, and doesn’t explicitly require attendance before 11 but if you want to get in, regardless of list status, you should probably be punctual.  Perhaps this is a slightly outdated summary of protocol since, admittedly, I haven’t been on a night I would call “busy busy” in a few seasons.  Last summer I stood at the front of the line(throng), nose to chin with a tall doorman in a suit, for 45 minutes, as I saw friends pop in and out to smoke, covered in the sweat of presumably boisterous dancing, and eventually gave up.  That guy doesn’t work there anymore and the new person was much more pleasant and inviting so maybe they have changed their mind regarding how exclusive they wish to be.

Nightmoves is in Williamsburg, on Grand street, and lies behind an anonymous looking door and a narrow wooden hallway. The bar is small and at left upon entering and across from a big round booth and several smaller low chairs and tables leading to a more private nook in the far back and opening up to a technicolored dance floor in the middle.  Back in the day this place was a different bar, called Larry Lawrence, which I always thought sounded like an art gallery.  At Larry Lawrence you could smoke outside at the top of the spiral staircase on the roof level outdoor section. At Nightmoves you cannot.  The place is, famously, owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, though I’ve never seen him there, and the sound system, which I know nothing about, is allegedly quite good.  Nextdoor is Four Horseman, a restaurant with a Michelin star and described by the Michelin men as a “chic and convivial wine-focused spot as minimalist as their succinct menu.”  I’ve never been there though I have several friends who have worked there or currently do.  I’m not sure why the urge to sip in this pared down place preparing paired up petite portions has never struck.  Perhaps I am more proclaved to crave beverages than food and beers and shots than wine.  Recently I went to Nightmoves for an old friend and past coworker’s birthday and was reminded of when we were here in its Larry Lawrence days for Metrograph’s staff party.  Our brave manager upped our management mandated drinks tab limit from $2000 to $3000 mid party.  He like many other of the managers back then didn’t stay too much longer but was missed.

Turntables and CDJs are behind the mirror fronted DJ booth that looks out over a grid of light up plexiglass squares that play out colorful designs beneath your feet as you dance.  Behind the bar are the instruments and ingredients with which to make the 10 or so cocktails on the list and a few taps.  I don’t really remember but I know they have like 3 beers and shots are expensive and the wine I'm sure must be good given the accolades of their co-tenant.  I feel like I always wind up drinking mescal here.  Why? I have no idea.  I hope I alluded to this before but I never feel fully comfortable at Nightmoves without being drunk. Not just because of its dance centric environment but there’s always static in the air even if the sound system itself would never lazily emit electric noise.  I have never been here and had a tab come out to less than $100.

Nightmoves is kind of like grinding your teeth in your sleep.  Yes, you are getting a deep night's sleep, but at what cost?  You have to white knuckle it a bit.  And that isn’t so relaxing.  It’s expensive beyond just general necessity so it isn’t a bar’s bar.  It’s for dancing, and though you need to be kinda fucked up on something, when it works it works.  They don’t seem to terribly mind drug use though it isn’t exactly convenient. Furthermore, I wouldn’t want to be rolling balls here as it would be inappropriate. This is where its ‘Williamsburginess’ feels relevant to mention. It does feel a bit of an up-charged, safely psychedelic, enclave. I’m not entirely sure who I’m trying to make people think I am when I’m there but I tend to feel the urge to play dress up. A desirable place to be on a weekend given the lines I’ve seen and sat in and would not want to brave it again. If you are in fact local to it I would assume it not worth your effort or maybe you know: know someone. I think it allows people either from the city or deeper reaches of Brooklyn the excuse to venture to center Williamsburg because they are only going because they’ve been invited along with the rest of the extended friend group so the bands getting back together. If it’s not busy it feels like the first slow song of a high school dance and if it’s too busy the small bar is rendered nearly inoperable. For these reason it falls firmly into the go if your friend is DJ’ing or having a birthday party realm with near zero overlap into any adjoining venn diagram circles.

However, given the occasion, the privacy of the institution can be yours to enjoy musical curation harmoniously. This part isn’t complicated. Do you like the DJ? Do you want to dance? If yes to both of these then yes you are going to have a good time and quite possibly with a cadre of your closest, if not in residential locale but relational fondness, compatriots at your side. So I don’t want you to think I am all bad on this place just a general perplexion past its obvious pros. Having a semi private vibe you begin to feel separated from the rest of the neighborhood, much like dancing on the rainbow lit plexi is more comfortable to the feet than the concrete floor that surrounds it.  The drunken revelers within its walls seldom think to let their minds find solutions to problems beyond the limits of the front door.  AKA if you have drugs you are sharing and if someone else has them you are asking politely.  It’s identity is in flux. Maybe James should make an appearance to take up the mantle of figure head. I could see that bringing the crowd down however.  In the meanwhile do you want to have to work hard to party? Buy a night guard for $100 worth of either booze or blow; your choice.

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1089 Grand St. Brooklyn, NY 11211

Most any trip to PUMPS results in at least some noteworthy ocurrance. So, it is hard to decide which one warrants being THE one. Rather than tell you about the time we went after the GhettoGothik party in a warehouse down the street, in the middle of winter, in 7 degree weather, with products that are measured in metric units in our pockets, or the time we took Bubba for his farewell party and when we tried to pry him away from the bar at 3:50am, to get in the cab outfront, he refused to be separated from his two new dancer friends, who he was buying Champagne for, and he was heartset on getting both his and his father’s credit cards frozen - I’ll tell you instead about the night we agreed to swear it off for good.

I got off work early from my restaurant bartending job, for once, and went to meet my friend Tyson at my other bar bartending job.  Tyson makes me a Mezcal margarita, for which I squeeze the juice of one lime and decide it yields a vastly superior experience to the bottled stuff we served the general public.  Tyson declares his girlfriend is out of town and, to honor the occasion, insists we must get fucked up.  Now Tyson is, generally speaking, a man of his word; especially when you wish he wouldn’t. He says what he means be it not what you wanted to hear nor even taking into account whether you were listening. Luckily on this day our ambitions had perfectly aligned. We detailed our plan of action in order to best accomplish our objective.

“Alex you get two beers, I’m gonna get us two shots, and after those we will get two more of each.” 

“Of course, and excellent delegating. This will undoubtedly aid us in achieving our goal.” 

Several rounds later we were in an eight person dice game and the pot had been triple-juiced. Neither Tyson nor I won. Which was for the best since had we we would have played a $100 1 v 1 game for which there would have only been one of two outcomes: 

1 - Tyson wins and I lose $100. Although upsetting, I would have been comforted by the fact I could say I had played a $100 game of dice; having doubled my previous record of $50 (which I lost). (EDIT: since 2016 I have played many $100 games on dice only a few of which I don’t regret.)

2 - I win the game and Tyson gets sour about it. He asks for his money back, to which I oblige because I don’t like taking money from my friends. This is assuredly what the outcome would be, since that’s exactly how all 3 of our previous $20 games have ended. I won each of those and each time I returned my winnings. Meaning I although I won I had in fact lost since in the games before I had lost a $5 and $10 leading up to the $20 so returning the $20 means I still lost $15. Tyson got his $20 back and won $15. But I was not upset. I couldn't hold a grudge against this smiley midwesterner. A hosier more specifically. No matter where you go there is a hosier doing something important there. Vonnegut wrote that in Cat’s Cradle.

Cooler heads prevailed and we made a pact to play a $100 dice game the moment we met in San Juan, Puerto Rico for a vacation a couple weeks after that night. (EDIT: We both had the good sense to pretend not to have said that and neither of us mentioned it. We lost our money at the Ritz instead.)

At some point Tyson decided we needed a change of scenery. More importantly we had run out of cigarettes.  Whilst en route, we ran into a co worker mine from my other job getting off her bartending shift. We told her our plans to get hammered at Mr. Fong’s and she said she will meet us there. Now we know we at least have a free round in our future since there’s nothing a tired and overworked bartender likes more than to spend her recently acquired tips on buying upper shelf tequila for a fellow drinker. Spending your whole night charging strangers for alcohol does something to imbalance the chemistry of your brain in such a way that the only proven method to recalibrate it is to go out of your way to spend your money on giving others free drink.

We stopped by the bodega and orchestrated the standard $8 Virginia pack transaction (that’s 2016 prices). I am not sure what people still paying full price are doing but they must lead happy lives blissfully unaware of the burden of discount. Once you get used to spending $8 for a pack you cannot allow yourself to pay full price and instead will go days without the pack of your preference just to adhere to your frugal convictions. (EDIT: sounds like I did not really smoke that much back in 2016 because you can totally go back to paying full price and doing so every other day so idk what 28 year old Alex was talking about). You will even go to the lengths of trying out whatever other strange varieties they provide at discount; flavors such as full body organic menthol and the paradoxical ‘orange pack’ of American Spirits. The orange pack bares all the common and expected qualities of a cigarette - cylindrical, 20 in number, requiring fire for use - but they are not in fact cigarettes. They operate in the same manner but without any of the pesky taste, sensation, lightheadedness, nor even a detectable presence of heat. Hopefully the bodega soon refilled its stocks with the help of our generous southern countrymen. 

At Fong’s we were promptly served a free round from the bartender.  As it was, he knew Tyson and I were worked in the area and he was motivated by the same mental condition I described my coworker having. We drink these and then pay for the next.  My coworker arrives and gets the next.  By this point I was in a state of which I hadn’t born witness to in months. (Doesn’t sound like that much to me now but whatever.) I checked in with Tyson to see how our task for the night was progressing and he assured me we had reached our goal. After a short strategical huddle we decided to celebrate our success with another round.

We enter a sacred space of the human experience. Some ideas are the fruits of long hours of labor and careful consideration: philosophy, political argument, mathematical theorems.  Others are the random collisions of ions of potential energy striking the inebriated.  Deciding when and when not to go to a strip club resides in the latter. At the next moment the following sentence was uttered, at really the only time it makes any sense or has any merit being, offered up.  “We should go to PUMPS,” Tyson said matter of factly.

I didn’t agree.  At least not immediately. I was tired and I must be have been too drunk at this point because Tyson kept asking me how I was doing. But being drunk I was not able to argue my side of the issue effectively.  I was only five blocks from home, in the Lower East Side, and PUMPS is all the way in Bushwick and I didn’t like Bushwick. (Still don’t) Furthermore, I really didn’t like having to cab all the way back to LES, at 4:00am, drunk. Tyson offered that I could cab home with him to Crown Heights and crash at his place but the idea of getting myself home in the morning under what I could only assume would be a fantastic hangover (it was) overrode any convenience that would have afforded me.

Outside I lost a quick game of “First to Land a Tre-flip” and we meandered our way down Madison Street to Allen Street; in search of more fertile cab hailing territory. (Then it was. Now? Good luck.)  Here is a charade you may know.  It was a piece of theater with the plot synopsis “my phone is dead, so I can’t call an Uber, but I’ll hail the first cab we see.”  Tyson played the part of the phoneless well and imparted upon me no cause for suspicion he did not intend to do what he said.  The problem lied in how long could I stand to wait for said transportation to materialize? Tyson was victorious when after five minutes when I declared I could not wait and would call an Uber. Tyson, fully in the right, said “OK I would have gotten it but if you wanna call one, sure.”

What I wanted to do was walk home.  What I even could have done was taken the Uber home, and, generously, allowed Tyson the opportunity to continue on in the car to either further his adventure or retire to Crown Heights. What I did do was sit in an Uber across the Williamsburg Bridge, widening the gap between myself and bed. Although previous experience gave me no reason to believe so, I tried to comfort myself with the hope the lap dance would make up for the total disregard I have had for my own needs that evening.  This complicated array of intentions was doing strange and disorienting things to my mind and equilibrium.  I realized as we hit Grand Street, in Brooklyn, the alcohol and spirited driving of the Uber driver had disrupted my orientation and I politely requested the driver pull over for a brief moment so I could think more clearly and perhaps breathe some fresh air. I exited the vehicle and moved behind it. I had a quick conversation with the ground and decided I didn’t like it’s attitude and expelled my lunch onto it. With a fresh perspective and a nominally clearer state of mind I re-entered the cab and made the first healthy decision of the night. 

“Would you mind taking me back to the LES to right where you picked me up?” I asked.

“You want to go back across the bridge?” the driver replied.

“Yes.”

“No PUMPS?” Asked Tyson.

“No PUMPS.” I answered.

“Ok homie, get home safe.”

By some miracle of midwestern constitution Tyson got out of the car and successfully piloted his skateboard down Grand Street as I was swept back to my own neighborhood, on the island, hoping vomiting had taken the edge off tomorrow’s hangover.

The next afternoon I woke up to an email from Uber informing me I had lost an item in the driver’s car the night before. I also woke up fully clothed and thanked myself for making it that much easier to rush out to the coffee shop.  As it happened Tyson had left his wallet, and a pack of cigarettes, in the Uber - the contents of the wallet having been of special significance to Tyson and the pack of his cigarettes having been of special significance to myself.  In the wallet: a winning lotto ticket for a $1 prize, a check for $1,300 and a $100 bill. If I knew Tyson even a little bit he was really gonna want that $1 lottery ticket back so I proceed through the proper Uber lost item protocol and left the man a message describing the artifacts in question. I should mention that the driver’s profile said his name was ‘Jean’ but when I called his phone the message machine said ‘Kevin.’  Soon I received the first of several calls from Jean or Kevin and was cordially reminded by him ‘he is going out of his way to come all the way to the LES to drop of the wallet and cigarettes’ somewhere between 7 and 15 times.  I understood this to mean I was supposed to tip handsomely.  

“How do you want to do this?” Jean/Kevin asked. 

“Well I have to work later and I live in the Lower East Side so if you’re in the area at all today and could swing by that’d be awesome,” I replied.

“Ok but I’m in Brooklyn so you want me to go out of my way to the Lower East Side to drop it off?”  [Without the slightest hint of sarcasm]

“Yes, yes I do.”

“Ok sir you got it I’ll come out of my way and be there soon.”

How did I want to do this? Man I don’t have a car, you have the car, a quick hop over the bridge is nothing for you. Yeah I want you to drive over here. What am I gonna take the train to Brooklyn to get someone else’s wallet?  I don’t particularly care about the wallet, I really only want the cigarettes.  After that unsuccessful cab ride I could at least use a free pack of cigarettes and for all practical applications you and the car are one. You are the car. (Wow 2016 Alex. Now very chill vibes from you rn.) I called Tyson and told him the good news.

“Was my lotto ticket there?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the hundred dollars?”

“Nope.”

“That’s fine I really just want that lotto ticket.”

“The check is here too.”

“Oh, cool.”

Tyson that night had only had a couple bucks in his pocket and his phone was dead and he didn’t know where he was and had no wallet which he learned when trying to get a bodega sandwich. Also skating from Grand and Union to Crown Heights is far.  Although though we didn’t make it to the strip club that night, I have been back since then. The last time I went to PUMPS it was like 3:30am and I never managed to get a dance but I had already purchased the little lap dance token with shiny letters saying “good for one dance.” After the exploits of this night I have now told you about we decided mutually to not do this again. We made a new pact to stop going to PUMPS and this one we kept. (EDIT: no we didn’t. I’ve been back plenty of times since then and I no longer have that token on my desk as I am about to tell you. I went back to use it at some point in the last 7 years).

I still have my Pump’s token on my desk, on top of a stack of hard drives. I pick it up from time to time and rub it in between my fingers and let the shiny letters play off the overhead light. I think it’s probably good luck.  If you haven’t been to PUMPS it’s like walking through a portal to Portland Oregon. Also it’s more deserving of the description of “titty bar” than strip club.  The Champagne is a novelty item; don’t order that. It’s fun but if you didn’t already know it existed then you don’t really need to.

When I first started frequenting King Tai I was bartending 6 nights a week split between Metrograph and the old Beverly’s location on Essex.  My only night off a week I would escape to Bed Stuy and spend the night on a friend’s blow up mattress as a sort of mini vacation from Manhattan.  I think it was Tuesdays.  My friend Cameron lived down the street from King Tai on the Crown Heights side of Atlantic.  The bar resides in a small square building that had a few tables for outside seating even before the pandemic. The name is a holdover from the business previously at the address: a laundromat.  Cam and I generally took two stools at the bar and would act out a little piece of public theater you may have seen before called “yeah I could have a beer or two but I’m not really trying to drink.”  Back then the menu was written on the wall high behind the bar and listed cocktails numbered 1 to 7 or 1 to 5 or something about 6 plus or minus 1.  Currently they have a printed menu or QR scannable menu of cocktails with names, but they still change with the seasons.  There was usually a tequila/mezcal drink, something with whiskey, a gin or vodka and then a couple of rum concoctions as this place favors itself a bit of a rum bar.  Cam and I would peruse said list and choose whichever was our fancy then chat the bartender up with some sort of mixological gossip and say annoying things like “oh you guys have Dimmi you don’t see that very often.” Cam even worked there at one point but only ever at random. Though he wouldn’t admit it I believe it was for subtractive financial purposes rather than to garner a wage.  I’ve never had a bad drink here, regardless of what I’ve chosen, and I presume the numbers were just for ease of transaction and not a coursing requirement as 6 average would be a lot of drinks for one sitting.

Routinely we would try all 6.  In order often but not as a rule.  We’d drink one tequila, one tequila/mezcal, one gin, one rum, one vodka, and one more rum.  This would have been a more than appropriate place to call it for the evening, but instead we’d continue on to two Pacificos and two shots of tequila.  Right about now Cameron is drunk enough to suggest, and I am drunk enough to oblige, that we have a pair of Death in the Afternoon’s.  

“You aren’t gonna have one with me?  You fancy yourself a writer and you’re gonna make me drink alone?”

“I’m not gonna ‘make’ you do anything.”

“Hemingway would be rolling in his grave.” 

“Let him!”

“This is just like in St. Croix when you made me drink three all by myself.”

“That’s on you. I was driving. And then that big rasta guy threw his beer at you.”

“Oh right. In front of that bodega.”

“Yeah we were drunk and couldn't figure out why.”

“I should have bought that Coogi shirt.”

In the compilation cocktail book titled “So Red The Nose,” edited by Sterling North and Carl Kroch, in 1935, with illustration courtesy of Esquire magazine, Hemingway describes the Death in the Afternoon as absinthe in a champagne flute topped with iced Champagne and he recommends you drink 3 to 5 of them; slowly.  I do not recommend you do this as you will surely black out but if you must then be sure to remain close to home or bed and maybe have a more sober person to escort you there but not your 5 foot tall 100 pound, if dressed for cold weather and wearing snow boots, ex-girlfriend as was the case on my last walk down that road.  We drink one a piece and now I have to get a cab back to the city because I am no longer fit for public transportation, but first we go next door to the corner chicken spot named simply Chris.  I’ve never known whether the food there tastes good or not.  I’ve only been there drunkenly past 2, so I can’t speak on the matter other than to say under those circumstances it’s delicious.

The bar is a little L shape at the left of the room when you walk in.  There are stools stuck into the floor around it and a few more at counters by the windows on either side of the entrance.  A few tables and chairs to the right and in the right back corner before the bathroom is a big circular booth lovingly referred to by some as “the hot tub.”  The color scheme is pink and a soft turquoise and cream eliciting the feeling of a southern estate or Caribbean community house or possibly even a country club.  Often at a back rail, between the bar and bathroom, a DJ will set up with a host of vinyls and treat the room to a bit of sonic curation.  Imagine one stacking the record sleeve on the wall behind him in a gestural way as if to say he’s doing something more than just his job.  If you are curious about moving to the neighborhood of Crown Heights I would recommend you stop in on a Thursday after work or a Sunday afternoon and take notice of the clientele as to me it has always felt like a central casting session for a Brooklyn sitcom a la High Fidelity or High Maintenance.  Otherwise, it does get quite crowded and it’s really the kind of bar you want to sit down on chair at.

To state it plainly, and with no need to hem nor haw nor debate nor consider, it rests solidly in my personal Top 10 best bars in New York City list, and since the pandemic it’s sort of only gotten better.  Before they had a few chairs outside yes but they were generally taken early by local super regulars.  Now there are over twice as many.  Before you may have been able to get a veggie or chicken empanada heated up in a toaster oven for you.  Now they have tacos and banh mi and elote.  The cocktails may have become less numerical and less written on a wall in chalk but no less tasty.  Another notable feature, and perhaps less discussed but no less important, is the restroom.  Unfortunately there is only one but as those in the know know it is one of the Top 3 best mirror selfie opportunities in the tri-state area.  I am not sure if it’s the gentle lighting, the soft jade green back wall, or perhaps the mirror itself is some finely crafted artifact the secrets of which are lost to time.  Regardless, I dare you to go document yourself there and not be impressed.

I sit in the best seat, for a solo patron, at the end of the bar, next to the pass and abutted to the couple on a date to my right, shielding me from the public.  For me this is optimal.  In theory, I could tap in to run an espresso order out or shake a gimlet, should one of the staff become incapacitated; like sitting in the exit row on an airplane. This is the first time, out of the many I’ve been here, which feels typical or usual or routine.  Every other visit has been an occasion.  Therefore, I must be ready to write about it.  I order a mescal coconut milk drink.  The bartender says “you don’t really want that do you?”  We go way back, he's just messing with me.  “Yes,” I reply.  “I mean I’ll make it if you want it.”  “It just seems like something I wouldn’t order so I have to.”  I am reminded of sitting on a stool in the same spot at a different looking bar when this was Mission Chinese, and a different employee of the family of Aisa Shelley helmed drinking establishments tended a darker hued, kitschy bar.  One of the most popular cocktails Mission Chinese served was made with coconut milk and came in a little bowl to make it look like Tom kha gai soup.  Maybe I’m spending too much time writing notes in my phone but Casino’s coconut cocktail is starting to taste like that last little bit of melted milk in an old shake.  I know that sounds like a bad thing but I am really enjoying it.

On this past New Year’s Eve, I strolled up to Casino knowing it would be at least a scene, if not a publicized event.  I was instructed by the doorman to call someone inside to come vouch for me.  I called the owner, but was dismayed at the lack of an answer.  However, in but the shake of a lamb's tail, I was greeted by the ever friendly and welcoming Aisa Shelley.  I should disclose I’ve been friends with the owner, opener, and showrunner of Casino, for a number of years.  He even gave me my first crash course in cocktailery and bar theory, and the furtherance of my education was conducted by an apprentice of his from a decade ago when Aisa was a bartender at Rucola in Boerum Hill.  I was at the opening night of both Mr. Fong’s and Primo’s and occasionally we chat over a cup of coffee at Oliver Coffee (another place he opened).  Oddly, I've also been to three of his older brother's (and co-investor) birthdays by accident.  The night of New Year’s was festive, if a bit non-standard.  For instance, there was a Champagne tower but we didn’t do a countdown and no one kissed me on the lips.  I did meet a once great meme account admin, for the first time irl, but she thought I was someone else.

The premises are laid out nearly the same as Mission but with more scant decor, askewing to beauty through form, and gleamingly smooth skin.  The architecture is encased white plaster which I have no experience with but can only imagine must have taken quite a while. The seating in the front area and at the bar is first come first serve, whereas the dining room, in the back through a short tunnel-like hallway, is walk in and wait but I would really suggest trying to get a reservation if you can.  The pizza oven remains in the middle but is now used for T-bone steaks, turbot and prawns.  The dining room has tables with white tablecloths arrayed in the middle and red booths around the perimeter below shimmering sconces casting starry splays of light like distant headlights to those with an astigmatism.  I nearly had to spend a large birthday dinner here recently when an aquarian friend of mine said she’d get reservations for 8 at 8.  I showed up a tad fashionably late to no party and turned out, unable to get said res, she swapped for Lucien thinking it’d be easier.  The menu is described as “coastal Italian” and combined with the white plaster I’m reminded of a little Italian cafe I dined at in Cadaqués, Spain; on the Mediterranean near the seaside summer home of Salvador Dali.  At that time, years ago, I suffered a terrible case of food poisoning, but decided to risk, being lactose intolerant at the time, a meal of white pastas, cheese plates, fish, and gelato.  It cured me and for that I will be forever grateful so this is an ambiance more nurturing and warm to me than its stark palette would suggest.  In the bar dining area, which has its own separate bar menu, the bar steak and a few hors d'oeuvres are as far as I’ve made it.  If you are familiar with Primo’s cocktail list then the offerings here will feel like a close cousin.  The supposed drink of last year, and something Primo’s had a heavy hand in popularizing, the Espresso Martini, comes second in line to the Casino Cosmopolitan.  Some colleagues and I have been theorizing the Cosmo is set to make a return to populist status; for those looking to drink something served up anyway.  The rest of the menu has a few less mainstream but certifiable classics, some spritz, wine, and Narragansett or Peroni for $7; standard price for the area if not a dollar cheaper than some (or $3 cheaper if you’re talking Metrograph).

I’ve been waiting to talk about Casino for a while, partially so people have had a chance to visit, partially so it is up to speed, having opened in December, and mostly, because I didn’t know what to say.  There are a few places in downtown Manhattan people only need to make general gastronomical and geographical reference to for you to know exactly where they were.  “I just came from TriBeCa: Mole Frites and a martini.” The Odeon.  “Oh, we already ate in SoHo. Yeah, seafood tower and a martini.”  Balthazar.  “I’m headed home. I ate dinner solo and spent too much.  Steak au Poivre, at the bar, and a martini.”  Raoul’s.  “Lucien.” Lucien.  People generally like saying Lucien out loud.  The variety of food at these French styled bistros is something I generally avoid when I’m in actual France, but their purveyors do have history and cache.  Cool.  I don’t feel they're worth my time, and patience, at least not often, and I never felt any ownership of or preciousness towards them.  While I’ve never been over the moon about any of these eateries, I didn’t realize my opinions were eclipsed by location bias.  Casino opening in my neighborhood has me questioning my aversions to the aforementioned.  I walk in and see an old friend behind the bar and exchange a bit of news.  I run into another at the back bar tucked away downstairs behind the dining room, where on New Year’s the patrons took it upon themselves to tend the bar.  An artist you would know by her appearance poured us Champagne and we got to feel as if we are somewhere half secret.  The owner gave me a hat.  It’s like our neighborhood has its own skin in a particular sort of downtown game now.  A new ‘it spot’ but with participation from and for the neighborhood it resides in and owes some debt to for its existence.  True, the dining room gets its fair share of people expecting to be treated like a Hadid and a friend of mine has had multiple customers ask for a discount because they are going to post about it and they have a lot of followers.  Perhaps this is commonplace; it’s been a little while since I’ve had to deal with serving that type of clientele.  They are, however, all relegated to the back thinking getting a tough to secure reservation must mean they are in the best seat and of the highest available level of clout.  I posit they are mistaken.  The bar is simple, fair, democratic.  The menu gives you enough variety while making it still easy to order.  This is something each sibling in this family of bars has done well.  The cocktail menu at Primo’s is arranged in such a way you can order a Gibson Martini and feel that’s something you already knew and didn’t have to google.  “I have to run to a thing uptown so I’ll probably just get some olives and an order of fries.”  Warning: the frites are Julienne-cut so they're more like PikNiks - those string chips that come in a can.  This is my only real complaint, but, to be fair, I’ve eaten enough french fries and this place is Italian anyway, right?  So far I have had the pleasure of sitting with a friend for a cocktail turn into a multi-table of 12 and a crossfire of conversation.  The pleasure of shaking hands and putting faces to names I’ve heard come up in conversations about art or music or podcasts or what have you.  Unfortunately, I have also had the somewhat less pleasure of being the last to close out and stuck with the lion's share of whatever everyone else forgot.  Sometimes your fourth martini makes it a bit difficult to remember the first or second.  That night I paid, tipped heavy, and hurried to an opening in Chelsea.  A few hours later, when the wine ran out, someone offered up “there’s a dinner for the artist next - we might have an extra seat?”  “Oh no I ate earlier.  Bar steak and a martini down in my neighborhood.”  Casino.

Twins Lounge a bar with two-levels: half pool-dive and half sunroom, mid-century Tinder meet up spot. Perhaps tiki notes, perhaps a whiff of old Vegas but filter both those ideas through Los Angeles. The kind of place that will impress your date with your knowledge of such a vibey bar; that is if they haven't really been anywhere or don’t really drink like that. It’s as if they built it specifically to operate as such. Greenpoint, a neighborhood with many, currently or soon to be, relationship’ed, young professionals, seems too appropriate a home for it to be coincidence. Is the urge to couple and nest so strong here because the rent is too high to afford on your own? If not then maybe you’re killing it: move to the city or buy a Brownstone. The neighborhood is appealing to those with means, and this bar has two large bars and is cash only. I mention this to say: Twin’s must be making a killing.

I sit upstairs and sip a spritz that tastes like bitter velvet. The upstairs bar shares an aesthetic kinship with my great aunt Madd’s Ocean City (NJ) beach house, as I remember it in the 90’s, which means maybe furnished in the late 70’s?  The downstairs is long with those casino style cushioned stools with backs, booths lining the left wall, and two pool tables all the way in the back.  In the past, I have played many a game of pool here, generally too drunk to be any good, and have haunted the end of the bar taking shots with a buddy who works here.  “How’s the sour with Banane de Bresil?”  “It’s good but I prefer it with Hennessy.”  “I’ve heard that called a ‘Banana Hammock.’”  The owners of Twin’s opened the bar Carmelo’s, in Bushwick, a few years ago.  If nothing else, they know their audience and how to target it effectively.  Carmelo’s serves $2 draft Buds, making it popular with skateboarders, and the pool tables are as far away from the more polite floor level crowd as space will allow.  You can feel being in a dive without actually being in one, technically speaking.  One big difference being Carmelo’s always felt like a fight could break out at any time and that is noticeably missing here.  At Twin’s the deeper reaches of the bottom floor are far from any hint of sunlight while the more manicured bar upstairs is awash for most of the day; due to the windowed ceiling and front wall the likes of which I feel I’ve seen in movies with characters who live in Midtown.  

Personally, I’d have a hard time imagining coming here if I didn’t know a bartender, or couldn’t play a capable game of pool. I could imagining attending Thursday night drink appointments with coworkers or a friend group that works enough to necessitate a Google Calendar notification to actually get everyone in the same place.  It’s maybe less obviously ‘Greenpoint’ then the last rounds of tailor made establishments, such as Goldie’s, Pony Boy, or even Paulie Gee’s, but it does have the veneer of admitting its all artifice. Like it you took a sledge hammer to things it would be no deeper than a Bushwick remodeled apartment.  It invites you not to think about it.  

I, however, am thinking about it.  The plants are fake.  The room feels set decorated.  Have you been to London and experienced the recent brand of corpo pubs?  If not, there is a bit of a scandal in the UK about a small group of investment companies owning a percentage of the new pubs.  As if every dirty old pub in England got the Guliani Times Square treatment and now they are clean, corporate, and disheartening.  This, and other places in the greater Williamsburg/Greenpoint/East Williamsburg zone, are of a similar ilk but they said “make it Bushwick.”  There’s a compulsion homogenized around what a new Brooklyn bar is supposed to look like.  Not to say there aren’t these bars in the city.  Whenever someone asks me what Ray’s is like I reply “it’s like someone picked up a Greenpoint bar and dropped it behind the Bowery Mission.”  Flowershop feels too obvious to mention but it counts.  I get the appeal and I’ll abide by “bar bar,” but the underlying fibers are starting to be laid bare.  You know how those AI drawings always seem to get at least somethings correct but at the same time their weird robot minds’ shortcomings are eerily apparent?  Whatever our collective subconscious thinks the 70’s looked like is starting to become mass market; as if we were asked to recreate past social environments entirely drawing from episodes of “Stranger Things.”

Whilst I’ll return I am reminded of the time I toured the Warner Brothers backlot and walked down the New York street. I bumped into a fire hydrant and it fell over.  Good enough for government work, and I’m sure it won’t be long before we see a third enterprise from this group.  They have the Bushwick skaters covered, the Greenpoint prenatal career set handled, so where do they go next?  Where do the well to do 40+ (with or without) kids hang out?  Do they have time to hang out?  Fort Greene?

I am reminded of the term “technological leapfrogging,” as I sit next to a friend I have brought along for this field trip.  I ask her, my friend, if she has heard the term, she shakes her head no, so I ask her permission to explain.  From the Wikipedia entry:

… small and incremental innovations lead a dominant firm to stay ahead. However, radical innovations will permit new firms to leapfrog the ancient and dominant firm. 

I went into a bit about “you know how Europe has had those hand held credit card terminals for years and years and we only just got them?”  This bar feels like it’s on an old operating system - not the most recent update rather something two or three behind.  You wouldn’t expect it to be ahead of the curve just by looking at it but feels dated even for a uniform bar (suits, construction workers, cops, firefighters, city employees, even the plain clothed tend to choose a sporting allegiance).  Once someone wearing a flashy tracksuit instructed the bartender to give me and my friends a round of beers on the house; they were the owner.

We are seated approximately 30 feet from the front door and 100 feet from the back wall.  The physical bar counter itself is the length of 5 large flat screen TVs between 5 cash register stations and 5 back bar set ups with tiered shelves of alcohol from whence the term “top shelf liquor” is derived.  It is about the width of subway platform.   An array of unlabeled beer taps are perched at odd intervals down the bar rail like birds on a power line.  Despite this I have never seen it busy enough to necessitate such robust service infrastructure.  The store front is positioned halfway down a quick, thin bit of Nassau Street directly opposite the hotel entrance of The Beekman; home to two restaurants, a cocktail bar, and an underground club.  Were I staying there, in town for business, I would surely be delighted to have a reliable dive so close yet somehow the dingy sanctuary of Nassau Bar is beginning to feel out of place.

I imagine the year I was born, 1988, and the corridor packed with both wide lapeled suits and Carhartt double knees (when they were only worn by laborers) rushing to get as many drinks in themselves as possible on an hour long lunch break; each to return to making dangerous maneuvers restructuring the world of finance through edifice and artifice respectively.  All are afforded equal access to procure and imbibe and oogle the bartenders.  It is of seemingly paramount importance to note that every review, or news story, I’ve found regarding Nassau Bar has borne the phrase “bikini-clad bartenders.”  It is true the buxom babes busily bearing bottles of bud be bedecked in bikinis (or at maximum a sporty bra and booty shorts).  Given the lack of a competing dive bar nearby it does beg the question why?  I wonder if at some point in the past there were so many bars serving a similar clientele they needed to set themselves apart.  Perhaps it is thanks to these ladies they are one of the few still in business.

The guy next to me is chastised for whatever sports team was on his shirt last week.  “Wear it again and you’re outta here,” joked the bartendress.  It has that old timey New York feel where you know there’s at least one off duty cop here.  Wanna get a lil taste of Penn Station but don’t feel like taking the train above Canal Street?  Look no further.  Ever wonder what the New York bodega staple - the Bacon, Egg, and Cheese - would feel like if it morphed into brick and mortar?  Bon appetit!  Want to feel like you’re stealing a few hours away before you return to the old ball and chain (in New Jersey)? You needn’t be married nor have sired any children to get the job done. One thing you cannot do, however, is go number two.  In an ironic twist, you are only slightly more in charge of your bowels than an infant.  The men’s room has no lock, no toilet paper, no paper towels, and the sign on the door adequately conveys its restrictive intent, even to the illiterate, as it displays the simple image of a human sitting on a toilet with a big red ‘X’ over it.  Funny enough a friend of mine needing to relieve himself is what led us to dip into this bar for the first time years ago.  Upstairs there is a ‘women’s room’ which you must gain permission to access as it doubles as the employee restroom.

Nassau Bar being one of the few places worth visiting (or even existing), in the otherwise ghost town of FiDi, makes me feel a little hollow.  The area has been largely abandoned by entertainment, save for the odd cocktail lounge, and a very unenthusiastic stripclub (that once double charged me and I was unsuccessful in disputing the charge).  The Patriot closed recently and although I hated The Patriot where else are you supposed to be told a tall tale from an old drunk about the time he almost assassinated a former president and alleged billionaire?  Nassau Bar’s red-lit counter no longer needs to brace for a happy hour rush like the seventh inning stretch of a Yankees game - or even an intermission at the opera.  Do people not get shit housed on their lunch breaks anymore?  Is temperance to blame or has the afterwork drinks market been stolen by tech offices with hard kombucha on tap?  As we leave the bar and walk down Nassau Street we pass a newish looking Variety Coffee.  I feel the crowd at Nassau is probably more of Dunkin and that meme about “if you see ______ in your neighborhood, your rent is going up” comes to mind.  “If a trendy coffee shop opens on your street, your business is going down…”  if you’re a specific type of dive bar in a specific neighborhood.  Admittedly the audience for that meme is quite small.   Should I be thankful there are a few pieces of “Old New York” still to be seen; even if the individual examples aren’t especially shining?  I remember when I moved here I would occasionally be struck by the sight of a corner or an alley way or an old store front and think “wow the 80’s.”  Perhaps I’ve been self-afflicted by nostalgia for a time that didn’t exist.  I hear that’s going around.

I first went to The River the week it opened to visit a friend tending the bar; usually I would have had to go all the way to Flushing Ave (a street in Bushwick) to see him.  It was opening week so I reserved any judgments since it was clearly not yet up to speed (that friend quit a week later).  This same friend, who I feel like I should give a name to now that I’m talking about him so much so let’s call him Tex, went in recently to use the restroom on his way to meet me at Clandestino.  He used the urinal, which is behind a semi see-through swing style saloon door made of a flap of skinny tree limbs.  Ten minutes later he sat down next to me and I asked if it smelled of urine. “Surprisingly no but the night is still young.”  I had wondered whether it wise to allow prying eyes in at the expense of odors sneaking out, and posited “did they do that to prevent people from doing drugs in there?”  “Oh people still do drugs in there,” Tex reassured me.

The bar itself is rather dimly lit and has no windows.  The decor is sort of western? Or maybe this is a ski lodge?  A woodsy cabin perhaps as the columns could be described as arboreal.  Whichever it is doesn’t immediately explain its name.  We aren’t particularly close to either the Hudson or East Rivers, but are a stone’s throw from the jail.  Could it be a reference to being ‘sent up the river’ aka shipped off to jail?  I could see the lack of windows being useful for illicit engagements.  If you could smoke inside there wouldn’t be the throng standing in front and you might never realize it to be a bar at all.  The bar really doesn’t give off the vibe of being more cigarette themed than say an AirBar.  Its windowless facade invites you to imagine who or what may lurk behind its door and coat room and second saloon style door.  What turn of luck might the interior reveal?  Perhaps “The River” is in reference to the name of the final flipped card in Texas Hold Em. One gamble you are presented with is whether to hang your jacket in the entryway not visible from inside the bar; I opt not to.

Inside it’s not as dramatic as all that.  Mostly similar crowd to any other downtown pop spot like its partner next door Dr. Clark’s (I have wondered what Clark could be a Doctor of but that’s for another review), but a bit higher emphasis on having guarantors of credit and lower in age. I talk to a 21 year old NYU student who goes to the gym twice a day and can’t drink well alcohol. I talk to a man who has recently made a lot of money off crypto and bought a place by Tompkins and isn’t sure what to do now.  I don’t mind being reminded of how old I am, or beholden to the management company of my rental, or how long it has been since I was 24, but if I know a particular locale is going to bring it to the fore I feel obligated to consider this when deciding whether to attend.  Feels like a good place to go if you want to wind up at the TriBeCa/SoHo apartment of a new acquaintance’s parents, which to be fair, 8 years ago I very much did.  I still do now but preferably as a guest of their benefactors.  

Feels like the kind of bar that would be cool in 50 years, if it is to make it that long, and reminds me of so many of the best bars, nearly themed, in San Francisco that feel like they first opened in the 60s or 70s and still seem to be frequented by their original clientele (EDIT: many of these have closed).  Through the night the crowd does eventually get older.  The young set either have school tomorrow or maybe double down and party somewhere else where beers are cheaper so the room clears up for an older set. I start to spy art consultants and gallerists I either know or recognise.  A brightly smiling woman my age and I have a nice little conversation about something.  I run into two or three friends I haven’t been able to accidentally intersect with in a while. One is incensed, the other is placative, while I am nonplussed.  Though roomier I would bet the bar tab totals has increased substantially.  It seems this bar is formatted to serve and extract from both these groups of clientele and I am briefly impressed by the flexibility of this. En vogue enough to draw the young hot to trots but prohibitive enough in pricing to require a certain amount of disposable income.  It’s not a very most romantic nor alluring synopsis when put this way, and I suppose is just a description of most new things of Downtown.  For example, surely the champagne list only exists 22nd birthdays and office holiday parties.  The urge to buy an admittedly sensibly priced bottle of Moet passes over me like an Instagram Story filter as I try to remember why I chose to come here.

As the close of the night seems near at hand, something began to change: both I and my fellow revelers have become a bit more interested in one another, a bit less cautious, and the ‘flow’ ever so slightly more went with.  I thought of my previous visits and my previous eye rolling at this new it spot.  I looked at my old friends, new acquaintances, and a healthy bar tab and thought “am I not having fun?”  Is not running into people and meeting new ones what a bar is for?  The environment isn’t corporate really, though it does have a uniform which I’ve repeatedly overheard being talked about by patrons on every single of my visits to The River, and a design team of some recognition did the interior.  Neither is really of my concern but ringing in my head are the immortal words of Maximus Decimus Meridius, from Gladiator which I just rewatched on Netflix, “are you not entertained?”  Perhaps another, non fictionalized, old adage is still true today “one cannot step into the same river twice,” - said someone old and affectual and dead.  Before you blame me for being too fickle I also met a young woman who informed me this was her bar.  She was young and lovely and very nice to me even after I told her I had intended to write a negative review.  She asked to exchange numbers so I could send it to her when finished.  I haven’t decided yet whether I will, but for the future  it’s probably best not to fraternize with the ownership if it can be avoided. I walk home down a familiar perplexingly titled avenue a block up: Canal Street. A canal is sort of a river no?

When making an expensive purchase it is advisable to buy in bulk to, at least optically, achieve some sort of discount.  If you’ll allow me a bit of arithmetic: the Martini Service at the Swan Room serves 4-6 (persons or martinis) which the menu denotes “MP” aka Market Price.  I muse for a moment about this, tickled by the idea of vodka or gin having a price fluctuation day to day depending on the catch.  I imagine a truck rolls up to the back door on Division Street and the bar manager haggles with a booze monger over Belvederes and Plymouths.  “I know it was $25.99 per yesterday but those were 750ml and these are a full liter!”  Of course they wouldn’t think their customer would drink well and far be it from them to assume your martini preference, dirty or straight, let alone brand.  As a matter of chance I shared drinks with the Maitre d’ down the street after her shift.  Furthermore, it happened to be her birthday at midnight, so we all counted down and shared birthday shots.  She told me the MP is about $130.  Given the Manhattan martini standard bearer, Bemelmans Bar in the Carlyle Hotel, starts at $28 (and serves 2), I calculate Swan Bar to be similar in theory to a classic American Apparel discount: “buy 5 and get the 6th 15% off.”  I ordered the Spicy Goldfinch, a fruity mezcal shaken drink ($24 and served up with a dusting of chili powder) and my friends got a Debutante (gin, Cocchi Rosa, rose) and classic Sazerac.  The cocktails were all served up and tasted fine.  What, however, certainly must be excellent are the Pommes Frites; which are $18.  It has been a few years since I worked at a restaurant so I may have missed some rather dramatic technological advancements in the potato market.  Unfortunately I wasn’t feeling peckish (I made dinner at home) because for $18 it must surely fill a punchbowl.  After observing the table next to us, I can tell you it does not, rather it comes as a small bouquet with only truffle aioli on the side.  I am uncertain as to the market price of ketchup.

Swan Room occupies what was the lobby of the first Jewish owned bank in New York City.  The bank failed after a run on funds caused by German families pulling out their savings to send home to relatives during World War 1; which means this building has had a lot of experience being vacant.  For as long as I’ve lived in this neighborhood it has been under construction to become one sort of luxury hotel or another, so when it finally opened this past summer I was genuinely surprised.  I was even more surprised to learn its name, 9 Orchard Hotel, since I always thought of the building as being on Allen and/or Canal Streets.  Similar to the Metrograph down the street, it has the feeling of being in a place that used to be something else.  Metrograph was an auto body shop, which is why the front entry way is so tall because it was originally a metal roll up tall enough to fit trucks.  The Swan Room is lovely enough with a ceiling so high I almost feel rude sitting down.  The staff on the night I was there was even a bit on the short side and perhaps further amplified the canopy’s grandeur.  It’s full of granite and ornate stone patterns and a few reproduction Ming era Chinese vessels atop the bar.  A few battery powered lamps are perched atop the booth tables but the most effective source of light are the ambient LED street lights just outside the massive windows high above you on, in fact, Orchard Street.

My new friend the Maitre d's previous job was at the Chateau Marmont where she had been poached from 2 months prior.  Obviously the Chateau is no stranger to celebrity so, in keeping, she informed me Madonna had flown in to grace the Swan Room a week ago.  I am reminded which variety of clientele the martini service and frites are meant to attract: visiting business professionals looking to impress, a bevy of downtown socialites on a brand’s sponsorship, local celebs wanting TriBeCa or SoHo without taking a cab, etc.  Someone at our impromptu birthday party put it best as “a beautiful choice for where to drink if someone else is paying.”  Surely for the coming winter months the Swan Room will be a flutter with curious new guests, some from the rooms upstairs, craning over a tin carafe of 4-6 martinis.  When in flight, a group of swans referred to as a wedge, stemming from the shape of their formation in the sky, however, when on the ground, the name for the same group of swans is a bank.  A bank of swans.  If that was on purpose they are a bit more clever than I thought.

On what was probably the last warm and sunny Sunday before winter, two brothers sat down at an empty table, on the sidewalk of Le Dive, at the corner of Ludlow and Canal, in the popular Lower Manhattan hamlet of “Dimes Square.”  They waited a bit longer than expected at the Parisian styled bar for the waiter to come around.  “Did you seat yourselves?”  They nodded their heads in the affirmative, “sorry is that ok?” “Well it is now,” she said with a bit of a grimace and dashed indoors to collect menus.  Though the bar is a pleasantly accurate interpretation of common French faire, save for perhaps the lack of tabac for sale and a TV displaying horse racing results, it may have some of a gap in operational norms to deal with.  For instance, now one has to wonder whether cigarettes are also taboo.  Like its nextdoor neighbor and area scion Clandestino, Le Dive brings an ethos to the arrondissement which has increasingly benefited from the Covid era outside dining and temporary street closures.  Whilst Clandestino purposely pares down its menu and enforces some regulations to simplify the endeavor to revel, Le Dive positions itself somewhere between that and the other new nearby fixture the multiple venues at the new 9 Orchard Hotel.  Half a dozen oysters will set you back $24, tartare or sardines with baguette come in at a pinch more than half that, and the frites are better than necessary for $9 (served only with mayo).  Natural wine, champagne, and a standard cocktail list do not disappoint and for those wanting Le Marais on a budget it has one of the cheapest beers in a 4 block radius (the champagne of) a Miller High life for $5.  A visit to clink glasses and say “santé” is obligatory but be careful of the deceptive ramp entrance on Canal.  The sign there will tell you to enter on Ludlow. This advice may save you from the giggles of the other Parisian cosplayers next door who undoubtedly witness the constant confusion of uninitiated clientele.  It’s still new after all.

Le Dive is at 37 Canal St. in Manhattan.